EA Forum is a recurring publication in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between November 25, 2021 and May 30, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as "EA Forum: Good News On Tackling Climate Change"; "Also from the EA Forum this month"; "Gregory Lewis on the EA Forum". It most often appears alongside China, effective altruism, Richard Hanania.
- Article page
- EA Forum
- Mention count
- 9
- Issue count
- 9
- First seen
- November 25, 2021
- Last seen
- May 30, 2024
Outbound links
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221104130431/https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/1m-bet-rules
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221129133112/https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challenge-on-covid-vaccine-safety-efficacy/
- http://web.archive.org/web/20221224061743/https://www.skirsch.com/covid/SaarWilf.pdf
- https://archive.ph/pY4gF#selection-663.103-683.190
- https://firstthings.com/jd-vance-states-the-obvious-about-ordo-amoris/
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jCwuozHHjeoLPLemB/how-long-do-policy-changes-matter-new-paper
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/n8Qrjgsu3im6ATvyz/forecasting-in-policymaking-four-models
- https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qkhoBJRNQT4EFWos7/what-are-effective-ways-to-help-ukrainians-right-now
- https://web.archive.org/web/20230104080248/https://www.rootclaim.com/
- https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/27/business/media/heather-cox-richardson-substack-boston-college.html
- https://www.rethink.org/advice-and-information/living-with-mental-illness/medications/what-is-cobenfy-also-known-as-karxt-or-xanomeline-trospium/
Issue trail
Related pages
Source context
29: EA Forum: Good News On Tackling Climate Change. Although we’re less likely than hoped to reach the target of < 1.5C of warming, we’re also less likely than feared to reach truly awful scenarios like RCP8.5 (>6C of warming). Partly this is just because, as we move forward in time and see how things go, uncertainty decreases and the chance of extreme scenarios goes down. Partly it’s because we’ve genuinely made progress in things like solar power (and, although we haven’t banned coal, we’ve mostly succeeded at not vastly increasing our coal use, which was never certain). And partly it’s because we’ve studied climatology more and ruled out some scenarios where the climate is super-hyper-sensitive to carbon. As a result, the authors’ interpretation of IPCC data says that the risk of RCP8.5 (the technical name for the worst warming scenario) has gone from 11% in 2015 to less than 1% today. We are probably on track for between 2 and 4 degrees of warming this century, which will be bad but not existentially catastrophic.
Inline links: Good News On Tackling Climate Change
You can read more about their methodology and reasoning on the post on Effective Altruism Forum, but I found this table helpful:
Inline links: Effective Altruism Forum
Also from the EA Forum this month: Comparing Top Forecasters And Domain Experts, by Arb Consulting (the team also includes one of the Samotsvety members who worked on the nuclear risk estimate).
Inline links: Comparing Top Forecasters And Domain Experts
4: Gregory Lewis on the EA Forum on something I got wrong a few months ago: rational predictions often update predictably. Related: is Metaculus slow to update? (probably no)
But this is a selfish preference coming from the part of me that wants to see philosophers have interesting fights. Most of me agrees with MacAskill’s boring good-PR point: long-termism rarely gives different answers from near-termism. In fact, I wrote a post about this on the EA Forum recently, called Long-Termism Vs. Existential Risk:
Inline links: Long-Termism Vs. Existential Risk
10: Vadim Albinsky on EA Forum: Is it really true that economic growth doesn’t increase happiness? Concludes that this is a pretty weak finding which goes away if you choose to do the analysis a little differently.
16: Yitz on EA Forum: Public Facing [AI] Censorship Is Safety Theater. Big AI companies have whole teams that spend months making sure their AI will refuse to draw boobs or swastikas. Then two weeks later some scrappy open source team releases a copy that can draw as many swastika-covered boobs as you want. Given that all the “Trust And Safety” stuff seems more about protecting AI companies’ reputations than really preventing boobs or swastikas from being drawn, what are we actually doing here? Is it damaging public trust in AI safety? Producing false confidence? Muddying the waters? I guess I should be in favor of this if it wastes AI talent that would otherwise be going to capabilities research - but as a social phenomenon it’s pretty strange.
Inline links: Public Facing [AI] Censorship Is Safety Theater
30: Stephen McAleese on EA Forum: Estimating the current and future number of AI safety researchers. There are probably about 300 AI safety researchers in the world [insert appropriate caveats], and their number seems to be increasing by about 28% per year (or 10x per decade); at this rate there will be 1500 in 2030. Does that mean that If we can make it another 60 years, every living human will be an AI safety researcher, there will be nobody left to work on capabilities, and the problem will be solved by default?
41: Effective Altruism Forum: The Spanish-Speaking Effective Altruism Community Is Awesome. EA has been trying for years to expand beyond its Anglosphere origins. Spanish is the natural first stop: a big language, linguistically and culturally similar to English - but it was really slow going. Now thanks to a few hard-working Hispanophone community organizers, it’s finally working out, and there will be an EA Global conference in Mexico City this January. For some reason I find this really inspiring. Contains a shout-out to ACX Grants recipient Nuno Sempere.
Inline links: The Spanish-Speaking Effective Altruism Community Is Awesome, an EA Global conference in Mexico City this January
47: EA Forum: A Letter To The Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists. Apparently the Bulletin published accusations of research misconduct about Will MacAskill which they knew to be false at the time of publication. Since then, two of the scientists the article said it approached have spoken out on Twitter (1, 2), confirming that the Bulletin never even interviewed them in the first place. Bulletin of Atomic Scientists are also the people who update the Doomsday Clock, so I guess if they’re liars that’s actually really good news for the world!
Why do we need the average effective altruist who donates a little bit each year and tries to participate in discussion on EA Forum? Because they’re the foundation that supports everyone else, plus they give some money and occasionally make good comments.
A new study (paper, EA Forum post) finds that this latter pessimistic theory is false! Using regression discontinuity (ie comparing votes that pass 51-49 vs. those that fail 49-51 in order to control for overall sentiment), the author finds that a specific election victory increases the chance of a policy being in effect up to 100 years later by as much as 40 percentage points. The moral of the story is: try to win referenda.
Inline links: paper, EA Forum post
I’m not going to make a big deal about Stone’s use of Google Trends, because I think he’s right that SF and Boston are the most EA cities. But taken seriously, it would suggest that Montana is the most Democratic state. Stone could potentially still object that movements aren’t supposed to gather 10,000 committed adherents and grow at 10% per year. They have to take hold of the population! Capture the minds of the masses! Convert >5% of the population of a major metropolitan area! I don’t think effective altruism has succeeded as a mass movement. But I don’t think that’s it’s main strategy - for more on this, see the articles under EA Forum tag “value of movement growth”, which explains: It may seem that, in order for the effective altruism movement to do as much good as possible, the movement should aim to grow as much as possible. However, there are risks to rapid growth that may be avoidable if we aim to grow more slowly and deliberately. For example, rapid growth could lead to a large influx of people with specific interests/priorities who slowly reorient the entire movement to focus on those interests/priorities. Aren’t movements that don’t capture the population doomed to irrelevance? I don’t think so. Effective altruism has managed to get plenty done with only 10,000 people, because they’re the right 10,000 and they’ve influenced plenty of others. Stone fails to prove that effective altruists don’t donate more than other people, because he’s used bad methodology that couldn’t prove that even if it were true. His critique could potentially evolve into an argument that effective altruism hasn’t spread massively throughout the population, but nobody ever claimed that it did. II. You might imagine that a group fixated on “effective altruism” would have a high degree of concentration of giving in a small number of areas. Indeed, EAist groups tend to be hyper-focused on one or two causes, and even big groups like Open Philanthropy or GiveWell often have focus areas of especially intense work. And yet, the list of causes EAists work on is shockingly broad for a group whose whole appeal is supposed to be re-allocating funds towards their most effective uses. Again, click the link I attached above. EAists do everything from supporting malarian bednets (seems cool), to preventing blindness-related conditions (makes sense), to distributing vaccines (okay, I’m following), to developing vaccines in partnership with for profit entities (a bit more oblique but I see where you’re going with it), to institutional/policy interventions (contestable, but there’s a philosophical case I guess), to educational programs in rich countries (sympathetic I guess but hardly the Singer-esque “save the cheapest life” vibe), to promoting kidney transplants (noble to be sure but a huge personal cost for what seems like a modest total number of utils gained), to programs to reduce the pain experienced by shrimp in agriculture (seems… uh… oblique), to lobbying efforts to prevent AI from killing us all (lol), to space flight (what?), to more nebulous “long term risk” (i.e. “pay for PhDs to write white papers”), to other even more alternatively commendable, curious, or crazy causes. My point is not to mock the sillier programs (I’ll do that later). My point is just to question on what basis so broad a range of priorities can reasonably be considered a major gain in efficiency. Is it really the case that EAists have radically shifted our public understandings of the “effectiveness” of certain kinds of “altruism”? A few responses: Technically, it’s only correct to focus on the single most important area if you have a small amount of resources relative to the total amount in the system (Open Phil has $10 billion). Otherwise, you should (for example) spend your first million funding all good shrimp welfare programs until the marginal unfunded shrimp welfare program is worse than the best vaccine program. Then you’ll fund the best vaccine program, and maybe they can absorb another $10 million until they become less valuable than the marginal kidney transplant or whatever. This sounds theoretical when I put it this way, but if you work in charity, it can quickly becomes your whole life. It’s all very nice and well to say “fund kidney transplants”, but actually there are only specific discrete kidney transplant programs, some of them are vastly better than others, and none of them scale to infinity instantaneously or smoothly. The average amount that the charities I deal with most often can absorb is between $100K and $1MM. Again, Open Phil has $10 billion. But even aside from this technical point, people disagree on really big issues. Some people think animals matter and deserve the same rights as humans. Other people don’t care about them at all. Effective altruism can’t and doesn’t claim to resolve every single ancient philosophical dispute on animal sentience or the nature of rights. It just tries to evaluate if charities are good. If you care a lot about shrimp, there’s someone at some effective altruist organization who has a strong opinion on exactly which shrimp-related charity saves shrimp most cost-effectively. But nobody (except philosophers, or whatever) can tell you whether to care about shrimp or not. This is sort of a cop-out. Effective altruism does try to get beyond “I want to donate to my local college’s sports team”. I think this is because that’s an easy question. Usually if somebody says they want to donate there, you can ask “do you really think your local college’s sports team is more important than people starving to death in Sudan?” and they’ll think for a second and say “I guess not”. Whereas if you ask the same question about humans and animals, you’ll get all kinds of answers and no amount of short prompting can solve this disagreement. I think this puts EAs in a few basins of reflective equilibrium, compared to scattered across the map. So is there some sense, as Stone suggests, that “so broad a range of priorities [can’t] reasonably be considered a major gain in efficiency”? I think if you look at donations by the set of non-effective-altruist donors, and the set of effective-altruist donors, there will be much much more variance, and different types of variance, in the non-EAs than the EAs. Here’s where most US charity money goes (source): Try spotting existential risk prevention on here. I don’t think Stone can claim that an EA version of this chart wouldn’t look phenomenally different. But then what’s left of his argument? III. Effective altruists devote absolutely enormous amounts of mental energy and research costs to program assessment, measurement of effectiveness. Those studies yield usually-conflicting results with variable effect sizes across time horizons and model specifications, and tons of different programs end up with overlapping effect estimates. That is to say, the areas where EAist style program evaluations are most compelling are areas where we don’t need them: it’s been obvious for a long time how to reduce malaria deaths, program evaluations on that front have been encouraging and marginally useful, but not gamechanging. On the other hand, in more contestable areas, EAist style program evaluations don’t really yield much clarity. It’s very rare that a program evaluation gets published finding vastly larger benefits than you’d guess from simple back-of-the-envelope guesswork, and the smaller estimates are usually because a specific intervention had first-order failure or long-run tapering, not because “actually tuberculosis isn’t that bad” or something like that. Those kinds of precise program-delivery studies are actually not an EAist specialty, but more IPA’s specialty. My second critique, then is this: there is no evidence that the toolkit and philosophical approach EAists so loudly proclaim as morally superior actually yields any clarity, or that their involvement in global efforts is net-positive vs. similar-scale donations given through near-peer organizations. The IPA mentioned here is Innovations For Poverty Action, a group that studies how to fight poverty. They’re great and do great work. But IPA doesn’t recommend top charities or direct donations. Go to their website, try to find their recommended charities. Unless I’m missing something, there are none. GiveWell does have recommended charities - including ones that they decided to recommend based on IPA’s work - and moves ~$250 million per year to them. If IPA existed, but not GiveWell, the average donor wouldn’t know where to donate, and ~$250 million per year would fail to go to charities that IPA likes. I think from the perspective of people who actually work within this ecosystem, Stone’s concern is like saying “Farms have already solved the making-food problem, so why do we need grocery stores?” (also, effective altruism funds IPA) I’m focusing on IPA here because Stone brought them up, but I think EA does more than this. I don’t think there’s an IPA for figuring out whether asteroid deflection is more cost-effective than biosecurity, whether cow welfare is more effective than chicken welfare, or figuring out which AI safety institute to donate to. I think this is because IPA is working on a really specific problem (which kinds of poverty-related interventions work) and EA is working on a different problem (what charities should vaguely utilitarian-minded people donate to?) These are closely related questions but they’re not the same question - which is why, for example, IPA does (great) research into consumer protection, something EA doesn’t consider comparatively high-impact. And I’m still focusing on donation to charity, again because it’s what Stone brought up, but EA does other things - like incubating charities, or building networks that affect policy. IV. Let’s skip farm animal welfare for a second and look at the next few: Global Aid, “Effective Altruism,” potential AI risks, biosecurity, and global catastrophic risk. These are all definitely disproportionate areas of EAist interest. If you google these topics, you will find a wildly disproportionate number of people who are EAist, or have sex at EAist orgies, or are the friends of people who have sex at EAist orgies. These really are some of the unique social features of EAism. And they largely amount to subsidizing white collar worker wages. I’m sorry but there’s no other way to slice it: these are all jobs largely aimed at giving money to researchers, PhD-holders, university-adjacent-persons, think tanks, etc. That may be fine stuff, but the whole pitch of effective altruism is that it’s supposed to bypass a lot of the conventional nonprofit bureaucracy and its parasitism and just give money to effective charities. But as EAism as matured into a truly unique social movement, it is creating its own bureaucracy of researchers, think tanks, bureaucrats… the very things it critiqued. Suppose an EA organization funded a cancer researcher to study some new drug, and that new drug was a perfect universal cure for cancer. Would Stone reject this donation as somehow impure, because it went to a cancer researcher (a white-collar PhD holder)? EA gives hundreds of millions of dollars directly to malaria treatments that go to the poorest people in the world. It’s also one the main funders of GiveDirectly, a charity that has given money ($750 million so far) directly to the poorest people in the world. But in addition to giving out bednets directly, it sometimes funds malaria vaccines. In addition to giving to poor Africans, it also funds the people who do the studies to see whether giving to poor Africans works. Some of those are white-collar workers. EA has never been about critiquing the existence of researchers and think tanks. In fact, this is part of the story of EA’s founding. In 2007, the only charity evaluators accessible by normal people rated charities entirely on how much overhead they had - whether the money went to white-collar people or to sympathetic poor recipients. EAs weren’t the first to point out that this was a very weak way of evaluating charities. But they were the first to make the argument at scale and bring it into the public consciousness, and GiveWell (and to some degree the greater EA movement) were founded on the principle of “what if there was a charity evaluator that did better than just calculate overhead?” In accordance with this history, if you look on Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, their #1 Misconception about about charity evaluation is that “looking at a charity’s overhead costs is key to evaluating its effectiveness”. This is another part of my argument that EA is more than just IPA++. For years, the state of the art for charity evaluators was “grade them by how much overhead they had”. IPA and all the great people working on evidence-based charity at the time didn’t solve that problem - people either used CharityNavigator or did their own research. GiveWell did solve that problem, and that success sparked a broader movement to come up with a philosophy of charity that could solve more problems. Many individuals have always had good philosophies of charity, but I think EA was a step change in doing it at scale and trying to build useful tools / a community around it. V. You could of course say AI risk is a super big issue. I’m open to that! But surely the solution to AI risk is to invest in some drone-delivered bombs and geospatial data on computing centers! The idea that the primary solution here is going to be blog posts, white papers, podcasts, and even lobbying is just insane. If you are serious about ruinous AI risk, you cannot possibly tell me that the strategy pursued here is optimal vs. say waiting until a time when workers have all gone home and blowing up a bunch of data centers and corporate offices. In particular terrorism as a strategy may be efficient since explosives are rather cheap. To be clear I do not support a strategy of terrorism!!!! But I am questioning why AI-riskers don’t. Logically, they should. I think if you have to write in bold with four exclamation points at the end that you’re not explicitly advocating terrorism, you should step back and think about your assumptions further. So: Should people who worry about global warming bomb coal plants? Should people who worry that Trump is going to destroy American democracy bomb the Republican National Convention? Should people who worry about fertility collapse and underpopulation bomb abortion clinics? EAs aren’t the only group who think there are deeply important causes. But for some reason people who can think about other problems in Near Mode go crazy when they start thinking about EA. (Eliezer Yudkowsky has sometimes been accused of wanting to bomb data centers, but he supports international regulations backed by military force - his model is things like Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program in the context of global norms limiting nuclear proliferation - not lone wolves. As far as I know, all EAs are united against this kind of thing.) There are three reasons not to bomb coal plants/data centers/etc. The first is that bombing things is morally wrong. I take this one pretty seriously. The second is that terrorism doesn’t work. Imagine that someone actually tried to bomb a data center. First of all, I don’t have statistics but I assume 99% of terrorists get caught at the “your collaborator is an undercover fed” stage. Another 99% get eliminated at the “blown up by poor bomb hygiene and/or a spam text message” stage. And okay, 1/10,000 will destroy a datacenter, and then what? Google tells me there are 10,978 data centers in the world. After one successful attack, the other 10,977 will get better security. Probably many of these are in China or some other country that’s not trivial for an American to import high explosives into. The third is that - did I say terrorism didn’t work? I mean it massively massively backfires. Hamas tried terrorism, they frankly did a much better job than we would, and now 52% of the buildings in their entire country have been turned to rubble. Osama bin Laden tried terrorism, also did an impressive job, and the US took over the whole country that had supported him, then took over an unrelated country that seemed like the kinds of guys who might support him, then spent ten years hunting him down and killing him and everyone he had ever associated with. One f@#king time, a handful of EAs tried promoting their agenda by committing some crimes which were much less bad than terrorism. Along with all the direct suffering they caused, they destroyed EA’s reputation and political influence, drove thousands of people away from the movement, and everything they did remains a giant pit of shame that we’re still in the process of trying to climb our way out of. Not to bang the same drum again and again, but this is why EA needs to be a coherent philosophy and not just IPA++. You need some kind of theory of what kinds of activism are acceptable and effective, or else people will come up with morally repugnant and incredibly idiotic plans that will definitely backfire and destroy everything you thought you were fighting for. EA hasn’t always been the best at avoiding this failure mode, but at least we manage to outdo our critics. VI. Stone moves on to animal welfare: It’s important to grasp that [caring about animals] is, in evolutionary terms, an error in our programming. The mechanisms involved are entirely about intra-human dynamics (or, some argue, may also be about recognizing the signs of vulnerable prey animals or enabling better hunting). Yes humans have had domestic animals for quite a long time, but our sympathetic responses are far older than that. We developed accidental sympathies for animals and then we made friends with dogs, not vice versa. Again, this is part of why I think it’s useful to have people who think about philosophy, and not just people who do RCTs. People having kids of their own instead of donating to sperm banks is in some sense an “error” in our evolutionary program. The program just wanted us to reproduce; instead we got a bunch of weird proxy goals like “actually loving kids for their own sake”. Art is another error - I assume we were evolutionarily programmed to care about beauty because, I don’t know, flowers indicate good hunting grounds or something, not because evolution wanted us to paint beautiful pictures. Anyone who cares about a future they will never experience, or about people on far off continents who they’ll never meet, is in some sense succumbing to “errors” in their evolutionary programming. Stone describes the original mechanisms as “about intra-human dynamics”, but this is cope - they’re about intra-tribal dynamics. Plenty of cultures have been completely happy to enslave, kill, and murder people outside their tribes, and nothing in their evolutionary mechanism has told them not to. Does Stone think this, too, is an error? At some point you’ve got to go beyond evolutionary programming and decide what kind of person you want to be. I want to be the kind of person who cares about my family, about beauty, about people on other continents, and - yes - about animal suffering. This is the reflective equilibrium I’ve landed in after considering all the drives and desires within me, filtering it through my ability to use Reason, and imagining having to justify myself to whatever God may or may not exist. Stone suggests EAs don’t have answers to a lot of the basic questions around this. I can recommend him various posts like Axiology, Morality, Law, the super-old Consequentialism FAQ, and The Gift We Give To Tomorrow, but I think they’ll only address about half of his questions. The other half of the answers have to come from intuition, common sense, and moral conservatism. This isn’t embarrassing. Logicians have discovered many fine and helpful logical principles, but can’t 100% answer the problem of skepticism - you can fill in some of the internal links in the chain, but the beginning and end stay shrouded in mystery. This doesn’t mean you can ignore the logical principles we do know. It just means that life is a combination of formally-reasonable and not-formally-reasonable bits. You should follow the formal reason where you have it, and not freak out and collapse into Cartesian doubt where you don’t. This is how I think of morality too. Again, I really think it’s important to have a philosophy and not just a big pile of RCTs. Our critics make this point better than I ever could. They start with “all this stuff is just common sense, who needs philosophy, the RCTs basically interpret themselves”, then, in the same essay, digress into: If I wanted to do this stuff, I would try terrorism.
Inline links: “value of movement growth”, managed to get plenty done with only 10,000 people, source, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!kkAy!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fa7c07ed1-bf2c-4faf-a990-cd0a4b8543fd_909x662.png, Giving What We Can’s List Of Misconceptions About Effective Altruism, Israel bombing Iraq’s nuclear program, I take this one pretty seriously, a spam text message, Axiology, Morality, Law, Consequentialism FAQ, The Gift We Give To Tomorrow