steven0461 comments on Bayesian Adjustment Does Not Defeat Existential Risk Charity - Less Wrong

43 Post author: steven0461 17 March 2013 08:50AM

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Comment author: 9eB1 15 March 2013 05:45:58AM 18 points [-]

Wonderful post. Thank you.

I have a feeling that the fundamental difference between your position and GiveWell's arises not from a difference of opinion regarding mathematical arguments but because of a difference of values. Utilitarianism doesn't say that I have to value potential people at anything approaching the level of value I assign to living persons. In particular, valuing potential persons at 0 negates many arguments that rely on speculative numbers to pump expected utility into the present, and I'm not even sure if it's not right. Suppose that you had to choose between killing everyone currently alive at the end of their natural life spans, or murdering all but two people whom you were assured would repopulate the planet. My preference would be the former, despite it meaning the end of humanity. Valuing potential people without an extremely high discount rate also leads one to be strongly pro-life, to be against birth control programs in developing nations, etc.

Another possibility is that GiveWell's true reason is based on the fact that recommending MIRI as an efficient charity would decrease their probability of becoming substantially larger (through attracting large numbers of mainstream donors). After they have more established credibility they would be able to direct a larger amount of money to existential charities, and recommending it now when it would reduce their growth trajectory could lower their impact in a fairly straightforward way unless the existential risk is truly imminent. But if they actually explicitly made this argument, it would undermine it's whole point as they would be revealing their fringe intentions. Note that I actually think this would be a reasonable thing to do and am not trying to cast any aspersions on GiveWell.

Comment author: steven0461 16 March 2013 02:04:28AM *  4 points [-]

I have a feeling that the fundamental difference between your position and GiveWell's arises not from a difference of opinion regarding mathematical arguments but because of a difference of values.

Karnofsky has, as far as I know, not endorsed measures of charitable effectiveness that discount the utility of potential people. (On the other hand, as Nick Beckstead points out in a different comment and as is perhaps under-emphasized in the current version of the main post, neither has Karnofsky made a general claim that Bayesian adjustment defeats existential risk charity. He has only explicitly come out against "if there's even a chance" arguments. But I think that in the context of his posts being reposted here on LW, many are likely to have interpreted them as providing a general argument that way, and I think it's likely that the reasoning in the posts has at least something to do with why Karnofsky treats the category of existential risk charity as merely promising rather than as a main focus. For MIRI in particular, Karnofsky has specific criticisms that aren't really related to the points here.)

In particular, valuing potential persons at 0 negates many arguments that rely on speculative numbers to pump expected utility into the present, and I'm not even sure if it's not right.

While valuing potential persons at 0 makes existential risk versus other charities a closer call than if you included astronomical waste, I think the case is still fairly strong that the best existential risk charities save more expected currently-existing lives than the best other charities. The estimate from Anna Salamon's talk linked in the main post makes investment into AI risk research roughly 4 orders of magnitude better for preventing the deaths of currently existing people than international aid charities. At the risk of anchoring, my guess is that the estimate is likely to be an overestimate, but not by 4 orders of magnitude. On the other hand, there may be non-existential risk charities that achieve greater returns in present lives but that also have factors barring them from being recommended by GiveWell.

Comment author: G0W51 12 June 2015 04:18:56AM *  0 points [-]

Karnofsky has, as far as I know, not endorsed measures of charitable effectiveness that discount the utility of potential people.

Actually, according to this transcript on page four, Holden finds that the claim that the value of creating a life is "some reasonable" ratio of the value of saving a current life is very questionable. More exactly, the transcript sad:

Holden: So there is this hypothesis that the far future is worth n lives and this causing this far future to exist is as good as saving n lives. That I meant to state as an accurate characterization of someone else's view.

Eliezer: So I was about to say that it's not my view that causing a life to exist is on equal value of saving the life.

Holden: But it's some reasonable multiplier.

Eliezer: But it's some reasonable multiplier, yes. It's not an order of magnitude worse.

Holden: Right. I'm happy to modify it that way, and still say that I think this is a very questionable hypothesis, but that I'm willing to accept it for the sake of argument for a little bit. So yeah, then my rejoinder, as like a parenthetical, which is not meant to pass any Ideological Turing Test, it’s just me saying what I think, is that this is very speculative, that it’s guessing at the number of lives we're going to have, and it's also very debatable that you should even be using the framework of applying a multiplier to lives allowed versus lives saved. So I don't know that that's the most productive discussion, it's a philosophy discussion, often philosophy discussions are not the most productive discussions in my view.

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