Perhaps much of what appears to be disagreement on how much dishonesty is permissible is in fact disagreement on how much words have meanings. I'll begin with a brief treatment of the reputation considerations for keeping one's word, and then complicate it. Continue reading
I've promoted Effective Altruism in the past. I will probably continue to promote some EA-related projects. Many individual EAs are well-intentioned, talented, and doing extremely important, valuable work. Many EA organizations have good people working for them, and are doing good work on important problems.
That's why I think Sarah Constantin’s recent writing on Effective Altruism’s integrity problem is so important. If we are going to get anything done, in the long run, we have to have reliable sources of information. This doesn't work unless we call out misrepresentations and systematic failures of honesty, and these concerns get taken seriously.
Sarah's post is titled “EA Has A Lying Problem.” Some people think this is overstated. This is an important topic to be precise on - the whole point of raising these issues is to make public discourse more reliable. For this reason, we want to avoid accusing people of things that aren’t actually true. It’s also important that we align incentives correctly. If dishonesty is not punished, but admitting a policy of dishonesty is, this might just make our discourse worse, not better.
To identify the problem precisely, we need language that can distinguish making specific assertions that are not factually accurate, from other conduct that contributes to dishonesty in discourse. I'm going to lay out a framework for thinking about this and when it's appropriate to hold someone to a high standard of honesty, and then show how it applies to the cases Sarah brings up. Continue reading
My friend Miri (quoted with permission) wrote this on Facebook a while back:
Midwesterners are intolerably passive aggressive. My family is sitting among some grass in the dunes because it's the only shady place and a park ranger drives by and says, "That grass you're sitting in--we try to protect that." I say the only thing that makes sense to say in response, which is, "Thanks for letting me know! We'll be careful with it." And I go back to my reading.
Then I look up and she's still there. I look at her for a few moments and she says, "You need to get out of there." I'm like, ok. Why can't you just say that the first time? Not everyone grew up in your damn convoluted culture. Say what you fucking mean.
In the comments, someone replied:
One of the best parts of NYC is that no one dances around what they mean to say here. On the contrary, once I heard a guy on the subway say, to confused-looking strangers, "Do you need some fucking help or what?”
This particular incident seems like obnoxious behavior on the part of the park ranger, but it got me curious about why this sort of norm seems to win out over more explicit communication in many places. Continue reading
A friend recently told me me that the ghosts that chase Pac-Man in the eponymous arcade game don't vary their behavior based on Pac-Man's position. At first, this surprised me. If, playing Pac-Man, I'm running away from one of the ghosts chasing me, and eat one of the special “energizer” pellets that lets Pac-Man eat the ghosts instead of vice-versa, then the ghost turns and runs away.
My friend responded that the ghosts don't start running away per se when Pac-Man becomes dangerous to them. Instead, they change direction. Pac-Man's own incentives mean that most of the time, while the ghosts are dangerous to Pac-Man, Pac-Man will be running away from them, so that if a ghost is near, it's probably because it's moving towards Pac-Man.
Of course, I had never tried the opposite – eating an energizer pellet near a ghost running away, and seeing whether it changed direction to head towards me. Because it had never occurred to me that the ghosts might not be optimizing at all.
I'd have seen through this immediately if I'd tried to make my beliefs pay rent. If I'd tried to use my belief in the ghosts' intelligence to score more points, I'd have tried to hang out around them until they started chasing me, collect them all, and lead them to an energizer pellet, so that I could eat it and then turn around and eat them. If I'd tried to do this, I'd have noticed very quickly whether the ghosts' movement were affected at all by Pac-Man's position on the map.
(As it happens, the ghosts really do chase Pac-Man – I was right after all, and my friend had been thinking of adversaries in the game Q-Bert – but the point is that I wouldn’t have really known either way.)
This is how to test whether something's intelligent. Try to make use of the hypothesis that it is intelligent, by extracting some advantage from this fact. Continue reading
People in the Effective Altruist and Rationalist intellectual communities have been discussing moving discourse back into the public sphere lately. I agree with this goal and want to help. There are reasons to think that we need not only public discourse, but public fora. One reason is that there's value specifically in having a public set of canonical writing that members of an intellectual community are expected to have read. Another is that writers want to be heard, and on fora where people can easily comment, it's easier to tell whether people are listening and benefiting from your writing.
This post begins with a brief review of the case for public discourse. For reasons I hope to make clear in an upcoming post, I encourage people who want to comment on that to click through to the posts I linked to by Sarah Constantin and Anna Salamon. For another perspective you can read my prior post on this topic, Be secretly wrong. The second section explores the case for a community canon, suggesting that there are three distinct desiderata that can be optimized for separately.
This is an essay exploring and introducing a few ideas, not advancing an argument. Continue reading
This is the last of a series of blog posts examining seven arguments I laid out for limiting Good Ventures funding to the GiveWell top charities. In this post, I articulate what it might look like to apply the principles I've proposed. I then discuss my prior relationship with and personal feelings about GiveWell and the Open Philanthropy Project.
A lot of arguments about effective altruism read to me like nitpicking without specific action recommendations, and give me the impression of criticism for criticism's sake. To avoid this, I've tried to outline here what it might look like to act on the considerations laid out in this series of posts in a principled way. I haven't constructed the arguments in order to favor, or even generate, the recommendations; to the contrary, I had to rewrite this section after working through the arguments. Continue reading
Otto Von Bismarck is supposed to have said that there is a special providence for drunkards, fools, and the United States of America. The people of the United States of America have repudiated that providence, in order to become a normal country. That protection has now been withdrawn.
It is a normal outcome for a presidential election in the Americas, with a constitutional system modeled after that of the United States, to empower an authoritarian strongman. We are, after enjoying more than two hundred years of our special providence, finally experiencing a normal outcome. This is bad news, but it is most likely not catastrophic news.
In my pre-election post, I outlined two main bad things about Trump:
These things were real risks, and still are. They are very, very bad in expectation. But they are still fairly improbable. This is very bad news, but to run through the streets panicking would be committing a category error. To the extent that a Trump victory carries tail risk, we have already incurred that cost. We have already lost that measure. The only thing to do is manage the mainline scenarios.
(UPDATE: I basically endorse Paul Christiano's take on managing the tail risk.)
To respond reasonably to a Trump victory, we have to think clearly about the threats posed by a Trump regime, and the opportunities we have to change that.
I'm going to start by explaining why, while both those outcomes are real risks, the system is unlikely to suddenly collapse. Then I will explore what Trump's support means, and what we should do about it.
Continue reading
Anna Salamon, executive director of CFAR (named with permission), recently wrote to me asking for my thoughts on fundraisers using matching donations. (Anna, together with co-writer Steve Rayhawk, has previously written on community norms that promote truth over falsehood.) My response made some general points that I wish were more widely understood:
This is part of a series of blog posts examining seven arguments I laid out for limiting Good Ventures funding to the GiveWell top charities. My prior post considered the third through fifth arguments, on influence, access, and independence. In this post, I consider the sixth and seventh arguments:
Argument 6: If no one else is willing to fund a program, then this is evidence that the program should not be funded. Crowding out other donors destroys this source of independent validation.
Argument 7: If Good Ventures fully funds every high-value giving opportunity it finds, this could lead to other donors preemptively abandoning programs the Open Philanthropy Project is looking into, thus substantially reducing the amount of effective giving in the Open Philanthropy Project's perceived current and potential focus areas.
Argument 6 is sometimes an important consideration, but is a poor fit for the GiveWell top charities, to the extent that most donors are already largely moved by GiveWell's recommendations. Argument 7 points to a real problem, and one that reflects poorly on the effective altruism movement, but the problem is not mainly concentrated in the area of funding. Continue reading
The 2016 US presidential election is likely unusually important, because Trump seems unusually likely to damage global coordination in ways that increase the risk of major wars – and to damage US political norms in ways that are likely to accelerate the decline of discourse and governance.
This is also an election in which the libertarian candidate has been unusually viable because he has any experience at all as a major government figure – despite his apparent lack of interest in the sorts of things a president needs to know about, such as other countries. Many people also want to register a protest vote with Green Party candidate Jill Stein, since they find Hillary Clinton's respectable establishment liberal misconstruals of the true and the good objectionable, and prefer disrespectable anti-establishment left-wing misconstruals of the true and the good.1
Many people agree that Trump is terrible and it would be much less bad if Clinton wins, but some people prefer a third-party candidate and are unwilling to simply back the lesser of two evils. Some people end up favoring a vote for Clinton on net; others favor a third party vote. Both types are distributed over many states.
A protest vote has the same value anywhere. Federal funding also becomes available for any party that gets more than 5% of the popular vote – and it seems like Johnson's share of the vote could pass that threshold. On the other hand, due to the US electoral college system, the cost of forgoing a Clinton vote has very different effect depending on which state you're voting in. In a "safe state" overwhelmingly likely to go to one of the two major candidates, your vote has very little effect on the outcome of the election. But in a "swing state" where the outcome is more in doubt, your vote has a comparatively large effect on the outcome. Scott Aaronson points out that this distinction creates the opportunity for gains from trade, and has been promoting the idea of vote-swapping in order to reconcile these interests. The idea is that one or more Clinton supporters in safe states pledge to vote for a particular third-party candidate, in exchange for a third-party voter pledging to vote for Clinton.
In a one-to-one swap, this keeps third party national percentages the same, but increases the chance the swing state goes for the desired candidate. This is enough to yield gains from trade if both sides share a preference for one major-party candidate over the other. But even if that's not true, a many-to-one swap can still create gains from trade, by increasing both the chance that the desired major-party candidate wins, the third-party candidate's share of the vote total.
One of my friends recently suggested that we can't trust this system not to be gamed by Trump voters. I think that this is mistaken. Continue reading
References
| ↑1 | This is not about the vaccines thing, which seems overblown – Stein seems basically correct there, that mandated vaccines are good but people have justified distrust in the medical establishment which needs to be addressed. |
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