Thanks for your comment.
How do you conclude from this that e.g. the effective altruists focused on AI safety are being inefficient?
Yes, as you stated I was working with the visible sample of EA's who aren't focused on existential risk. I feel the term in relation to existential risk is redundant since effective thinking about existential risk on Lesswrong.
And even if you're talking about e.g. donations to GiveWell's recommended charities, how does the first link establish that it's inefficient?
The crowding out effect occurs not just as the individual level (which isn't applicable to individual EA's given room for more funding consideration), but also at the movement level. Because EA's act en-bloc, and factor into their considerations 'what are other people not funding', they compete the supply a demand for donations against established institutional donors like the Gate's Foundation. One might wonder then that if that was true, why those Foundations don't close the funding gaps as a priority - and it looks like someone is trying to answer that here. Admittedly, I haven't got to reading the article fully but from a quick skim it looks like the magnitude of donations of high impact philanthropists is such it compensates for the 'ineffectiveness of their cause', since those charities Givewell recommends have less room for more funding - which becomes a higher order consideration at that scale. The obvious counterexample to this is GiveDirectly, but I wouldn't be suprised if the reason philanthropists don't like them is because of fear of setting a precedence (sp?) against productive mutualistic exchange.
"human values are complex". That's misleading, what's complex is human moral intuitions. When you define your goal in life, no one forces you to incorporate every single intuition that you have. You may instead choose to regard some of your intuitions as more important than others, and thereby end up with a utility function of low complexity. Your terminal values are not discovered somewhere within you (how would that process work, exactly?), they are chosen. As EY would say, "the buck has to stop somewhere".
I can't find the original post about the buck stopping after a bit of Googling. I'd like to keep looking into this!
I can't find the original post about the buck stopping after a bit of Googling. I'd like to keep looking into this!
The post I'm referring to is here, but I should note that EY used the phrase in a different context, and my view on terminal values does not reflect his view. My critique of the idea that all human values are complex is that it presupposes too narrow of an interpretation of "values". Let's talk about "goals" instead, defined as follows:
...Imagine you could shape yourself and the world any way you like, unconstrained by t
In this thread, I would like to invite people to summarize their attitude to Effective Altruism and to summarise their justification for their attitude while identifying the framework or perspective their using.
Initially I prepared an article for a discussion post (that got rather long) and I realised it was from a starkly utilitarian value system with capitalistic economic assumptions. I'm interested in exploring the possibility that I'm unjustly mindkilling EA.
I've posted my write-up as a comment to this thread so it doesn't get more air time than anyone else's summarise and they can be benefit equally from the contrasting views.
I encourage anyone who participates to write up their summary and identify their perspective BEFORE they read the others, so that the contrast can be most plain.