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Tyrrell_McAllister comments on Transparency and Accountability - Less Wrong
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Comments (141)
I have difficulty taking this seriously. Someone else can respond to it.
Assuming that much of the worst isn't rational. It would be a convenient soldier for your argument, but it's not the odds to bet at. Also, you don't make clear what constitutes a sufficient level of transparency and accountability, though of course you will now carefully look over all of SIAI's activities directed at transparency and accountability, and decide that the needed level is somewhere above that.
You say you assume the worst, and that other people should act accordingly. Would you care to state "the worst", your betting odds on it, how much you're willing to bet, and what neutral third party you would accept as providing the verdict if they looked over SIAI's finances and told you it wasn't true? If you offer us enough free money, I'll vote for taking it.
I have to say that my overall impression here is of someone who manages to talk mostly LW language most of the time, but when his argument requires a step that just completely fails to make sense, like "And this is why if you're trying to minimize existential risk, you should support a charity that tries to stop tuberculosis" or "And this is where we're going to assume the worst possible case instead of the expected case and actually act that way", he'll just blithely keep going.
With Michael Vassar in charge, SIAI has become more transparent, and will keep on doing things meant to make it more transparent, and I have every confidence that whatever it is we do, it will never be enough for someone who is, at that particular time, motivated to argue against SIAI.
Are you reading multifoliaterose carefully? He has made neither of these claims.
He said that supporting a tuberculosis charity is better than donating to SIAI, not that supporting a tuberculosis charity is the best way to fight existential risk.
And he hasn't advocated using something other than the expected case when evaluating a non-transparent charity. What you may infer is that he believes that the worst case does not significantly differ from the expected case in the context of the amount of money that he would donate. That belief may not be realistic, but it's not the belief that you impute to him.
I hesitate to point to language from an earlier version of the post, since multifoliaterose has taken out this language, but given that EY was responding to the earlier version, it seems fair. The original post included the following language:
(emphasis added)
I believe there originally may have been some links there, but I don't have them anymore. Nonetheless, if I correctly understand the references to utilitymonster, astronomical waste, and Shut Up and multiply, I do think that that multifoliaterose was arguing that even the sorts of donors most interested in minimizing existential risk should still give to those other charities. Does that reading seem wrong?
Here is my reading: Even in the case of utilitymonster,
his/her concern about tuberculosis (say) in the near term is high enough, and
SIAI's chances of lowering existential risk by a sufficient amount are low enough,
to imply that utilitymonster would get more expected utility from donating to StopTB than from donating to SIAI.
Also, multi isn't denying that utilitymonster's money would be better spent in some third way that directly pertains to existential risk. (However, such a denial may be implicit in multi's own decision to give to GiveWell's charities, depending on why he does it.)
I don't know that we disagree very much, but I don’t want to lose sight of the original issue as to whether EY’s characterization accurately reflected what multifoliaterose was saying. I think we may agree that it takes an extra step in interpreting multifoliaterose’s post to get to EY’s characterization, and that there may be sufficient ambiguity in the original post such that not everyone would take that step:
I did implicitly read such a denial into the original post. As Carl noted:
For me, the references to the Givewell-approved charities and the lack of references to alternate existential risk reducing charities like FHI seemed to suggest that multifoliaterose was implicitly denying the existence of a third alternative. Perhaps EY read the post similarly.
I agree that this is the most probable meaning. The only other relevant consideration I know of is multi's statement upstream that he uses GiveWell in part to encourage transparency in other charities. Maybe he sees this as a way to encourage existential-risk charities to do better, making them more likely to succeed.
Well, since multifoliaterose himself has been giving all of his charitable contributions to VillageReach, it's a sensible reading.
I don't use the word "assume" in the way that you describe, and I would be surprised if multi were.
Here I think we more-or-less agree. On my reading, multi is saying that, right now, the probability that SIAI is a money pit is high enough to outweigh the good that SIAI would do if it weren't a money pit, relative to a tuberculosis charity. But multi is also saying that this probability assignment is unstable, so that some reasonable amount of evidence would lead him to radically reassign his probabilities.