Another big area you didn't mention is Superforecasting, prediction markets and that kind of thing.

Open Phil doesn't appear to do this (they don't mention that often in their public facing docs.)

They do, though it's usually not the first thing they mention e.g. here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DTl4TYaTPMAtwQTju9PZmxKhZTCh6nmi-Vh8cnSgYak/edit

Hey Kaj,

I agree with a lot of these points. I just want to throw some counter-points out there for consideration. I'm not necessarily endorsing them, and don't intend them as a direct response, but thought they might be interesting. It's all very rough and quickly written.

1) Having a high/low distinction is part of what has led people to claim EAs are misleading. One version of it involves getting people interested through global poverty (or whatever causes they're already interested in), and then later trying to upsell them into high-level EA, which presumably has a major focus on GCRs, meta and so on.

It becomes particularly difficult because the leaders, who do the broad outreach, want to focus on high-level EA. It's more transparent and open to pitch high-level EA directly.

There are probably ways you could implement a division without incurring these problems, but it would need some careful thought.

2) It sometimes seems like the most innovative and valuable idea within EA is cause-selection. It's what makes us different from simply "competent" do-gooding, and often seems to be where the biggest gains in impact lie. Low level EA seems to basically be EA minus cause selection, so by promoting it, you might lose most of the value. You might need a very big increase in scale of influence to offset this.

3) Often the best way to promote general ideas is to live them. With your example of promoting science, people often seem to think the Royal Society was important in building the scientific culture in the UK. It was an elite group of scientists who just got about the business of doing science. Early members included Newton and Boyle. The society brought likeminded people together, and helped them to be more successful, ultimately spreading the scientific mindset.

Another example is Y Combinator, which has helped to spread norms about how to run startups, encourage younger people to do them, reduce the power of VCs, and have other significant effects on the ecosystem. The partners often say they became famous and influential due to reddit -> dropbox -> airbnb, so much of their general impact was due to having a couple of concrete successes.

Maybe if EA wants to have more general impact on societal norms, the first thing we should focus on doing is just having a huge impact - finding the "airbnb of EA" or the "Newton of EA".

With regards to "following your comparative advantage":

Key statement : While "following your comparative advantage" is beneficial as a community norm, it might be less relevant as individual advice.

Imagine 2 people Ann and Ben. Ann has very good career capital to work on cause X. She studied a relevant subject, has relevant skill, maybe some promising work experience and a network. Ben has very good career capital to contribute to cause Y. Both have aptitude to become good at the other cause as well, but it would take some time, involve some cost, maybe not be as save.

Now Ann thinks that cause Y is 1000 times as urgent as cause X, and for Ben it is the other way around. Both consider retraining for the cause they think is more urgent.

From a community perspective, it is reasonable to promote the norm that everyone should follow their comparative advantage. This avoids prisoner's dilemma situations and increases total impact of the community. After all, the solution that would best satisfy both Ann's and Ben's goals was if each continued in their respective areas of expertise. (Let's assume they could be motivated to do so)

However, from a personal perspective, let's look at Ann's situation: In reality of course, there will rarely be a Ben to mirror Ann, who would also be considering retraining at exactly the same time as Ann. And if there was, they would likely not know each other. So Ann is not in the position to offer anyone the specific trade that she could offer Ben, namely: "I keep contributing to cause X, if you continue contributing to cause Y"

So these might be Ann's thoughts: "I really think that cause Y is much more urgent than anything I could contribute to cause X. And yes, I have already considered moral uncertainty. If I went on to work on cause X, this would not directly cause someone else to work on cause Y. I realize that it is beneficial for EA to have a norm that people should follow their comparative advantage, and the creation of such a norm would be very valuable. However, I do not see how my decision could possibly have any effect on the establishment of such a norm"

So for Ann it seems to be a prisoner’s dilemma without iteration, and she ought to defect.

I see one consideration why Ann should continue working towards cause X: If Ann believed that EA is going to grow a lot, EA would reach many people with better comparative advantage for cause Y. And if EA successfully promoted said norm, those people would all work on cause Y, until Y would not be neglected enough any more to be much more urgent than cause X. Whether Ann believes this is likely to happen depends strongly on her predictions of the future of EA and on the specific characteristics of causes X and Y. If she believed this would happen (soon), she might think it was best for her to continue contributing to X. However, I think this consideration is fairly uncertain and I would not give it high weight in my decision process.

So it seems that - it clearly makes sense (for CEA/ 80000 hours/ ...) to promote such a norm - it makes much less sense for an individual to follow the norm, especially if said indiviual is not cause agnostic or does not think that all causes are within the same 1-2 orders of magnitude of urgency.

All in all, the situation seems pretty weird. And there does not seem to be a consensus amongst EAs on how to deal with this. A real world example: I have met several trained physicians who thought that AI safety was the most urgent cause. Some retrained to do AI safety research, others continued working in health-related fields. (Of course, for each individual there were probably many other factors that played a role in their decision apart from impact, e.g. risk aversion, personal fit for AI safety work, fit with the rest of their lives, ...)

Ps: I would be really glad if you could point me to errors in my reasoning or aspects I missed, as I, too, am a physician currently considering retraining for AI safety research :D

Pps: I am new to this forum and need 5 karma to be able to post threads. So feel free to upvote.

I think it's actually mentioned briefly at the end of Part 5: https://80000hours.org/career-guide/world-problems/

(In fact, the mention is so brief that you could easily remove it if your goal is to wait until the end to mention effective altruism.)

80k is now seperate from CEA or is in the process of being separated from CEA. They are allowed to come to different conclusions.

Hey.

So, I don't mean to be attacking you on these things. I'm responding to what you said in the comments above and maybe more of a general impression, and perhaps not keeping in mind how 80k do things on their website; you write a bunch of (cool) stuff, I've probably forgotten the details and I don't think it would be useful to go back and enage in a 'you wrote this here' to check.

A few quick things as this has already been a long exchange.

Given I accept I'm basically a moral hipster, I'd understand if you put my views in the 3 rather 4 category.

If it's of any interest, I'm happy to suggest how you might update your problem quiz to capture my views and views in the area.

I wouldn't think the same way about Spanish flu vs mental health. I'm assuming happiness is duration x intensity (#Bentham). What I think you're discounting is the duration of mental illnesses - they are 'full-time' in that they take up your conscious space for lots of the day. They often last a long time. I don't know what the distribution of duration is, but if you have chronic depression (anhedonia) that will make you less happy constantly. In contrast, the experience of having flu might be bad (although it's not clear it's worse, moment per moment, than say, depression), but it doesnt last for very long. Couple of weeks? So we need to accounts for the fact a case of Spanish flu has 1/26th of the duration than anhedonia, before we even factor in intensity. More generally, I think we suffer from something like scope insensity when we do affecting forecasting: we tend to consider the intensity of events rather than duration. Studies into the 'peak-end' effect show this is exactly how we remember things: our brains only really remember the intensity of events.

One conclusion I reach (on my axiology) is that the things which cause daily misery/happy are the biggest in terms of scale. This is why I think don't think x-risks are the most important thing. I think a totalist should accept this sort of reasoning and bump up the scale of things like mental health, pain and ordinary human unhappiness, even though x-risk will be much bigger in scale on totalism. I accept I haven't offered anything to do with solvability of neglectedness yet.

Hello Ben,

Main comments:

There are two things going on here.

On transparency, if you want to be really transparent about what you value and why, I don't think you can assume people agree with you on topics they've never considered, that you don't mention, and that do basically all the work of cause prioritisation. The number of people worlwide who understand moral uncertainty well enough to explain it could fill one seminar room. If moral uncertainty is your "this is why everyone should agree with us" fall back, then that should presumably feature somewhere. Readers should know that's why you put forward your cause areas so they're not surprised later on to realise that's the reason.

On exclusivity, you response seems to ammount to "most people want to focus on the far future and, what's more, even if they don't, they should because of moral uncertainty, so we're just going to say it's what really matters". It's not true that most EAs want to focus on the far future - see Ben Hurford's post below. Given that it's not true, saying people should focus on it is, in fact, quite exclusive.

The third part of my original post argued we should want EA should be morally inclusive even if we endorse a particular moral theory. Do you disagree with that? Unless you disagree, it doesn't matter whether people are or should be totalists: it's worse from a totalist perspective for 80k to only endorse totalist-y causes.

Less important comments:

FWIW, if you accept both person-affecting views and Epicureanism, you should find X-risk, pandemics or nuclear war pretty trivial in scale compared to things like mental illness, pain and 'ordinary human unhappiness' (that is, the sub-maximal happiness many people have even if they are entirely healthy and economically secure). Say a nuclear war kills everyone, then that's just few moments of suffering. Say it kills most people, but leaves 10m left who eek out a miserable existence in a post apocalyptic world, then you're just concerned with 10m people, which is 50 times less than just the 500m who have either anxiety or depression worldwide.

I know some people who implicitly or explicitly endorse this, but I wouldn't expect you to, and that's one of my worries: if you come out in favour of theory X, you disproportionately attract those who agree with you, and that's bad for truth seeking. By analogy, I don't imagine many people at a Jeremy Corbyn rally vote Tory. I'm not sure Jeremy shouldn't take that as further evidence that a) the Tories are wrong or b) no one votes for them.

I'm curious where you get your 90% figure from. Is this from asking people if they would:

"Prevent one person from suffering next year. Prevent 100 people from suffering (the same amount) 100 years from now."?

I assume it is, because that's how you put it in the advanced workshop at EAGxOX last year. If it is, it's a pretty misleading question to ask for a bunch of reasons that will take too long to type out fully. Briefly, one problem is that I think we should help the 100 people in 100 years if those people already exist today (both necessitarians and presentists get this results). So I 'agree' with your intuition pump but don't buy your conclusions, which suggests the pump is faulty. Another problem is the Hawthorne effect. Another is population ethics is a mess and you've cherry picked a scenario that suits your conclusion. If I asked a room of undergraduate philosophers "would you rather relieve 100 living people of suffering or create 200 happy people" I doubt many would pick the latter.

Effective Altruism is quite difficult to explain if you want capture all of its complexity. I think that it is a completely valid choice for an introductory talk to focus on one aspect of Effective Altruism as otherwise many people will have trouble following.

I would suggest letting people know that you are only covering one aspect of Effective Altruism, ie. "Effective Altruism is about doing the most good that you can with the resources available to you. This talk will cover how Effective Altruism has been applied to charity, but it is worth noting that Effective Altruism has also been applied to other issues like animal welfare or ensuring the long-term survival of humanity".

This reduces the confusion when they hear about these issues later and reduces the chance that they will feel mislead. At the same time, it avoids throwing too many new ideas at a person at once which may reduce their comprehension and it explains how it applies to an issue which they may already care about.

Very much enjoyed this. Good to see the thinking developing.

My only comment is on simple replacability. I think you're right to say this is too simple in an EA context, where someone this could cause a cascade or the work wouldn't have got done anyway.

Do you think simple replacability doesn't apply outside the EA world? For example, person X wants to be a doctor because they think they'll do good. If they take a place at med school, should we expect that 'frees up' the person who doesn't get the place to go and do something else instead? My assumption is the borderline medical candidate is probably not that committed to doing the most good anyway.

To push the point in a familiar case, assume I'm offered a place in an investment bank and I was going to E2G, but I decide to do something more impactful, like work at an EA org. It's unlike the person who gets my job and salary instead would be donating to good causes.

If you think replacability is sometimes true and other times not, it would be really helpful to specify that. My guess is motivation and ability to be an EA play the big role.