I think both research and advocacy (both to governments and among individuals) are highly important, and it’s very unclear which is more important at the margin.
It’s too simple to say basic research is more important, because advocacy could lead to hugely increased funding for basic research.
We’ve collated a list of all the approaches that seem to be on the table in the effective altruism community for improving the long-run future. There’s some other options, including funding GiveWell and GCRI. This doc also explains a little more of the reasoning behind the approaches. If you like more detail on how 80k might help reduce the risk of extinction, drop me an email at ben@80000hours.org.
In general, I think the question of how best to improve the long-run future is highly uncertain, but has high value of information, so the most important activities are: (i) more prioritisation research (ii) building flexible capacity which can act on whatever turns out to be best in the future.
MIRI, FHI, GW, 80k, CEA, CFAR, GCRI all aim to further these causes, and are mutually supporting, so are particularly hard to disentangle. My guess is that if you buy the basic picture, the key issues will be things like ‘which organisation has the most pressing room for more funding at the moment?’ rather than questions about the value of the particular strategies.
Another option would be to fund research into which org can best use donations. There’s a chance this could be commissioned through CEA, though we’ll need to think of some ways to reduce bias!
Disclaimer: I’m the Executive Director of 80,000 Hours, which is part of CEA.
Note that Toby is a trustee of CEA and did most of his government consulting due to GWWC, not the FHI, so it’s not clear that FHI wins out in terms of influence over government.
Moreover, if your concern is influence over government, CEA could still beat FHI (even if FHI is doing very high level advocacy) by acting as a multiplier on the FHI’s efforts (and similar orgs): $1 donated to CEA could lead to more than $1 of financial or human capital delivered to the FHI or similar. I’m not claiming this is happening, but just pointing out that it’s too simple to say FHI wins out just because they’re doing some really good advocacy.
Disclaimer: I’m the Executive Director of 80,000 Hours, which is part of CEA.
Read the response to poor cause choice and inconsistent attitude toward rigor as “while some EAs might be donating without enough thought, lots of others are investing most of their resources in doing more research”
The monoculture problem is something we often think about how to fix at 80k. We haven’t come up with great solutions yet though.
I also argued that the decline in the FB group is not obviously important. And if it’s difficult to avoid, but many movements started by a small group of smart people nevertheless go on to achieve a lot, that’s also evidence that it’s not important.
Hi Ben,
Thanks for the post. I think this is an important discussion. Though I’m also sympathetic to Nick’s comment that a significant amount of extra self-reflection is not the most important thing to EA’s success.
I just wanted to flag that I think there are attempts to deal with some of these issues, and explain why I think some of these issues are not a problem.
Philosophical difficulties
Effective altruism was founded by philosophers, so I think there’s enough effort going into this, including population ethics. (See Nick’s comment)
Poor cause choices
There’s a lot being done on this front:
GiveWell is running Labs, and Holden has said he expects to find better donation opportunities in the next few years outside of global health
CEA is an advocate of further cause prioritisation research, and is about to hire Owen Cotton-Barratt, to work full-time on it.
80k is about to release a list of recommended causes, which will not have global health at the top.
Non-obviousness
I think the more useful framing of this problem is ‘what’s the competitive advantage that has let us come up with these ideas rather than anyone else?’ I think more work on this question would be useful. This also deals with the efficient markets problem. If you don’t have an answer to this question, I agree you should be worried.
I’ve thought about it in the context of 80k, and have some ideas (unfortunately I haven’t had time to write about them publicly). I now think the bigger priority is just to try out 80k and see how well it works. More generally, we try to take our disagreements with elite common sense very seriously.
I don’t think recency is a problem. It seems reasonable that EA could only develop after we had things like the internet, good quality trial data of different interventions, and Singer’s pond argument (which required a certain level of global inequality and globalization), which are all relatively recent.
Inconsistent attitude toward rigor
I think this is mainly because people use the best analysis that’s out there, and the best analysis for charity is currently much more in-depth than it is for these other issues. We’re trying to make progress on the other issues at 80k and CEA.
Poor psychological understanding
My impression is that people at CEA have worried about these problems quite a bit. At 80k, we try to work on this problem by highlighting members who are really trying rather than rationalising what they want, which we hope will encourage good norms. We’ll also consider calling people out, but it can be a delicate issue!
Monoculture
I’m worried about this, but it’s difficult to change. All we can do is try to make an active effort to reach out to new groups.
Community problems
I don’t see the decline in quality of the FB group as a problem. EA was started by some of the smartest, most well meaning people I have ever met. It’s going to be almost impossible to avoid a decline in quality of discussion as the circle is widened.
I’ll also push back against equating the community with the FB group. There are efforts by other EA groups to build better venues for the community e.g. the EA Summit by Leverage. We don’t even need a good FB group so long as there are other ways for people to form projects (e.g. speak to 80k’s careers coaches) and get good information (read GiveWell’s research).
Hi, I’d like to clarify that we prioritise people who are optimising around positive impact, not earning to give. If someone takes earning to give seriously, then we view that as a good indicator, but we speak to lots of people who aren’t considering earning to give careers.
I started writing a response, but decided it would be better to summarise my general thoughts on degree choice and post them on our blog. So see our latest thoughts on how to pick a degree.
Insofar as this particular situation goes, I haven’t thought about it much, so take this with a pinch of salt. My gut reaction is that CompSci is slightly more impressive than bio engineering, and if it helps you learn to program better, then the skills will be more generally useful. You also say that bio engineering is a major time sink, which I’d see as a count against it. So, my highly uncertain impression is that I’d prefer CompSci. On the other hand, if you’ll find it easier and more motivating to study bio engineering and you’ll get better grades, then I’d rate that pretty highly (especially if aiming to continue into research).
FYI: There has been a discussion on 80,000 Hours (started by me) about the value of this project and how to maximise it.
Hey John, we discuss this quite a bit in the interview (esp 1st and 2nd questions). Happy to take further more specific questions here though.
People might prefer this pair:
Peter Buffett and Zizek on why philanthropists do more harm than good and Will MacAskill’s response on Qz.com
Sorry Luke, I didn’t want to bother you so didn’t ask, but I should have guessed you would have found this :)
Hi Luke,
This is certainly really important for 80k—it’s on our list of strategic considerations to investigate.
We haven’t looked into it in depth already, beyond knowledge of some relevant psychology literature (e.g. being primed by images of money has been found to make people more selfish in a couple of (probably dodgy) studies).
We’ve put a couple of measures in place which seem like they might help to mitigate the types of drift that don’t involve updating on new information. First, making a public commitment to make the world a better place in an effective way encourages people not to drift towards being non-altruistic (while is also sufficiently broad not to commit people to moral beliefs they might well want to change e.g. that animal suffering doesn’t matter), because people want to be consistent. Second, participating in the 80k community could help to counteract destructive social pressure from workplace communities. It remains to see how well these measures work—we’ll be keeping a close eye.
Ben
Givewell is effectively attempting to work out which charities most increase human welfare for dollar. So, a charity ‘fails’ if it becomes clearly less effective than the next best.
Heh almost, but the argument only seems to apply to xrisk. I don’t see much reason to think EA movement building is the most effective way to fight global poverty.
that sounds about right!
There must be some, and it we’d certainly like to investigate which areas of industry are the most harmful. But in general, it’s pretty hard for a career to result in the deaths of 600 people, which is a lower bound for what you could do with $1m (you could also fund SI for 1-2 years...). The most common harmful careers seem to inflict economic damage, and since the average dollar is spent on stuff which produces much less welfare than malaria nets or catastrophic risk research, you have to do a lot of it to outweigh your donations, like maybe 1-2 orders of magnitude more. Of course, doing lots of harm with your career might still be ethically impermissible. There’s also some tricky questions regarding the long term compounding benefits of economic growth.
That’s a fairly common and very interesting question. Carl’s got some thoughts on it, which we’ll hopefully get written up. It’s closely linked to two big and controversial issues: how good is economic growth and how good is technological progress? It’s a case of weighing your contribution to that against the extra donations you can make.
Quite a few 80k members are interested in entrepreneurship. We’d definitely like to investigate these kinds of questions. But haven’t found anyone yet.
that’s a good one. It’s going on the list. We have an upcoming series about happiness and career choice. The first (and one of the upcoming posts) are partially relevant. Drethelin’s suggesting a good general strategy. If spending’s the problem, you could also consider giving up on altruism in that domain, and making a difference in some other way. This is an example of macrooptimisation
Good question. We tend to take our charity evaluation from Givewell (though we’ve started our evaluation in some areas). So, we wouldn’t be able to easily answer this. I don’t think we’ve ever come across a charity which openly states its terms of surrender. What I can say is that the charities that tend to get recommended have a very focused method (e.g. distributing malaria nets) with a measurable outcome (less malaria), so it’s pretty obvious if their failing, and that would cause them to lose funding.
Glassdoor rarely properly includes the top paid employees (those people don’t fill out the survey). According to Goldman’s own figures, mean compensation per employee (across all employees) is ~$400k. It’ll be significantly higher if you’re in front office. Your expected earnings from a Goldman job are roughly the mean earnings multiplied by the expected number of years you’ll stay at the firm.