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Eliezer_Yudkowsky comments on Reply to Holden on The Singularity Institute - Less Wrong
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Your statement was that it was an extraordinary claim that SIAI provided x-risk reduction - why then would SIAI be compared to most other charities, which don't provide x-risk reduction, and don't claim to provide x-risk reduction? The AI-risk item was there for comparison of standards, as was global warming; i.e., if you claim that you doubt X because of Y, but Y implies doubting Z, but you don't doubt Z, you should question whether you're really doubting X because of Y.
Are you trying to argue that it isn't in fact being compared to other charities? (Specifically, by GiveWell?) Or merely that if it is, those doing such comparison are mistaken?
If you're arguing the former... huh. I will admit, in that case, that almost everything I've said in this thread is irrelevant to your point, and I've completely failed to follow your argument. If that's the case, let me know and I'll back up and re-read your argument in that context.
If you're arguing the latter, well, I'm happy to grant that, but I'm not sure how relevant it is to Luke's goal (which I take to be encouraging Holden to endorse SI as a charitable donation).
If SI wants to argue that GiveWell's expertise with evaluating other charities isn't relevant to evaluating SI because SI ought not be compared to other charities in the first place, that's a coherent argument (though it raises the question of why GiveWell ever got involved in evaluating SI to begin with... wasn't that at SI's request? Maybe not. Or maybe it was, but SI now realizes that was a mistake. I don't know.)
But as far as I can tell that's not the argument SI is making in Luke's reply to Holden. (Perhaps it ought to be? I don't know.)
I worry that this conversation is starting to turn around points of phrasing, but... I think it's worth separating the ideas that you ought to be doing x-risk reduction and that SIAI is the most efficient way to do it, which is why I myself agreed strongly with your own, original phrasing, that the key claim is providing the most efficient x-risk reduction. If someone's comparing SIAI to Rare Diseases in Cute Puppies or anything else that isn't about x-risk, I'll leave that debate to someone else - I don't think I have much comparative advantage in talking about it.
I agree with you on all of those points.
Further, it seems to me that Holden is implicitly comparing SI to other charitable-giving opportunities when he provides GW's evaluation of SI, rather than comparing SI to other x-risk-reduction opportunities.
I tentatively infer, from the fact that you consider responding to such a comparison something you should leave to others but you're participating in a discussion of how SI ought to respond to Holden, that you don't agree that Holden is engaging in such a comparison.
If you're right, then I don't know what Holden is doing, and I probably don't have a clue how Luke ought to reply to Holden.
Holden is comparing SI to other giving opportunities, not just to giving opportunities that may reduce x-risk. That's not a part of the discussion Eliezer feels he should contribute to, though. I tried to address it in the first two sections of my post above, and then in part 3 I talked about why both FHI and SI contribute unique and important value to the x-risk reduction front.
In other words: I tried to explain that for many people, x-risk is Super Duper Important, and so for those people, what matters is which charities among those reducing x-risk they should support. And then I went on to talk about SI's value for x-risk reduction in particular.
Much of the debate over x-risk as a giving opportunity in general has to do with Holden's earlier posts about expected value estimates, and SI's post on that subject (written by Steven Kaas) is still under development.