That article is half-joking, and still qualifies its advice a lot:
This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek suggestion, obviously - more appropriate for choosing from a restaurant menu than choosing a major in college. [...]
Does this have any moral for larger dilemmas, like choosing a major in college? Here, it's more likely that you're in a state of ignorance, than that you would have no real preference over outcomes. Then if you're agonizing, the obvious choice is "gather more information" - get a couple of part-time jobs that let you see the environment you would be working in. And, logically, you can defer the agonizing until after that.[...]
I do think there's something to be said for agonizing over important decisions, but only so long as the agonization process is currently going somewhere, not stuck.
We can actually try to quantify 'Is this process going somewhere?', by calculating the expected value for 'donate to MIRI', 'donate to FHI', etc., thinking about it some more, and then re-calculating (say, a week later). If after thinking about it and researching it a lot, your estimates are approximately the same (in absolute terms, and correcting for e.g. anchoring), then the process hasn't been useful, and this may be a case where agonizing is a waste of time.
If you're weighing Cause A against Cause B, and in March you expect 38 utilons from A and 41 from B, and in April you expect 42 utilons from A and 40 from B, then you'll have a hard time making up your mind, but the decision probably isn't very important.
On the other hand, if in March you expect 38 from A and 41 from B, and in April you expect 1500 from A and 90 from B, and in May you expect 150 from A and 190 from B.... then your decision is still difficult, but now it's probably reasonable for you to continue agonizing about it, where by 'agonizing' we mean 'acquiring more information and processing it more rigorously'.
This isn't an absolute rule, though. If a lot of value is at stake, and you're rigorous enough to estimate value to a lot of significant digits, then even if your preferences keep switching by proportionally small amounts, your decision may matter a lot in absolute terms. E.g., the choice between $5,000,010,000 and $5,000,000,000 matters a lot in a world where $10,000 can save lives.
In a discussion a couple months ago, Luke said, "I think it's hard to tell whether donations do more good at MIRI, FHI, CEA, or CFAR." So I want to have a thread to discuss that.
My own very rudimentary thoughts: I think the research MIRI does is probably valuable, but I don't think it's likely to lead to MIRI itself building FAI. I'm convinced AGI is much more likely to be built by a government or major corporation, which makes me more inclined to think movement-building activities are likely to be valuable, to increase the odds of the people at that government or corporation being conscious of AI safety issues, which MIRI isn't doing.
It seems like FHI is the obvious organization to donate to for that purpose, but Luke seems to think CEA (the Centre for Effective Altruism) and CFAR could also be good for that, and I'm not entirely clear on why. I sometimes get the impression that some of CFAR's work ends up being covert movement-building for AI-risk issues, but I'm not sure to what extent that's true. I know very little about CEA, and a brief check of their website leaves me a little unclear on why Luke recommends them, aside from the fact that they apparently work closely with FHI.
This has some immediate real-world relevance to me: I'm currently in the middle of a coding bootcamp and not making any money, but today my mom offered to make a donation to a charity of my choice for Christmas. So any input on what to tell her would be greatly appreciated, as would more information on CFAR and CEA, which I'm sorely lacking in.