Argh! Original post didn't go through (probably my fault), so this will be shorter than it should be:

First point:

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.

CEA = Giving What We Can, 80,000 Hours, and a bit of other stuff

Reason -> donations to CEA predictably increase the size and strength of the EA community, a good proportion of whom take long-run considerations very seriously and will donate to / work for FHI/MIRI, or otherwise pursue careers with the aim of extinction risk mitigation. It's plausible that $1 to CEA generates significantly more than $1's worth of x-risk-value [note: I'm a trustee and founder of CEA].

Second point:

Don't forget CSER. My view is that they are even higher-impact than MIRI or FHI (though I'd defer to Seanoh if he disagreed). Reason: marginal donations will be used to fund program management + grantwriting, which would turn ~$70k into a significant chance of ~$1-$10mn, and launch what I think might become one of the most important research institutions in the world. They have all the background (high profile people on the board; an already written previous grant proposal that very narrowly missed out on being successful). High leverage!

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

CEA and CFAR don't do anything, to my knowledge, that would increase these odds, except in exceedingly indirect ways. FHI might be the most credible opportunity here because of their academic associations, which give them more credibility in PR. I remember Luke saying that FHI and CSER's academic ties as the reason why they -- an not MIRI -- are better suited to do publicity than FHI.

Therefore, while I disagree with you that the most important thing is to increase the odds of the people at that government or corporation being conscious of AI safety issues, I think that given what values you have told me, FHI is the most likely to maximize them.

I would or recognize as 'EA' actions and organizations that are ethical through ways other than producing welfare/happiness, as long as they apply rationality to doing good.

You're a CEA employee, if I remember correctly? If so, your account of effective altruism seems rather different from Will's: "Maybe you want to do other things effectively, but then it's not effective altruism". This sort of mixed messaging is exactly what I was objecting too.

I would be interested to hear an elaboration of why a promise keeping charity is the best thing to do

I'm far from certain it is. But as far as I'm aware no effort at all is put into it at present, so there could be very low hanging fruit.

Thanks for the response. I agree with most of the territory covered, of course, but my objection here is to the framing, not the philosophy.

Maybe you want to do other things effectively, but then it's not effective altruism

So why does the website explicitly list fairness, justice and trying to do as much good as possible as EA goals in themselves? And why does user:weeatquince (whose identity we both know but I will not 'out' on a public forum) think that "actions and organizations that are ethical through ways other than producing welfare/happiness, as long as they apply rationality to doing good" are EA?

Hi,

Thanks for this post. The relationship between EA and well-known moral theories is something I've wanted to blog about in the past.

So here are a few points:

1. EA does not equal utilitarianism.

Utilitarianism makes many claims that EA does not make:

EA does not claim whether it's obligatory or merely supererogatory to spend one's resources helping others; utilitarianism claims that it is obligatory.

EA does not make a claim about whether there are side-constraints - certain things that it is impermissible to do, even if it were for the greater good. Utilitarianism claims that it's always obligatory to act for the greater good.

EA does not claim that there are no other things besides welfare that are of value; utilitarianism does claim this.

EA does not make a precise claim about what promoting welfare consists in (for example, whether it's more important to give one unit of welfare to someone who is worse-off than someone who is better-off; or whether hedonistic, preference-satisfactionist or objective list theories of wellbeing are correct); any specific form of utilitarianism does make a precise claim about this.

Also, note that some eminent EAs are not even consequentialist leaning, let alone utilitarian: e.g. Thomas Pogge (political philosopher) and Andreas Mogensen (Assistant Director of Giving What We Can) explicitly endorse a rights-based theory of morality; Alex Foster (epic London EtG-er) and Catriona MacKay (head of the GWWC London chapter) are both Christian (and presumably not consequentialist, though I haven't asked).

2. Rather, EA is something that almost every plausible moral theory is in favour of.

Almost every plausible moral theory thinks that promoting the welfare of others in an effective way is a good thing to do. Some moral theories that promoting the welfare of others is merely supererogatory, and others think that there are other values at stake. But EA is explicitly pro promoting welfare; it's not anti other things, and it doesn't claim that we're obligated to be altruistic, merely that it's a good thing to do.

3. Is EA explicitly welfarist?

The term 'altruism' suggests that it is. And I think that's fine. Helping others is what EAs do. Maybe you want to do other things effectively, but then it's not effective altruism - it's "effective justice", "effective environmental preservation", or something. Note, though, that you may well think that there are non-welfarist values - indeed, I would think that you would be mistaken not to act as if there were, on moral uncertainty grounds alone - but still be part of the effective altruism movement because you think that, in practice, welfare improvement is the most important thing to focus on.

So, to answer your dilemma:

EA is not trying to be the whole of morality.

It might be the whole of morality, if being EA is the only thing that is required of one. But it's not part of the EA package that EA is the whole of morality. Rather, it represents one aspect of morality - an aspect that is very important for those living in affluent countries, and who have tremendous power to help others. The idea that we in rich countries should be trying to work out how to help others as effectively as possible, and then actually going ahead and doing it, is an important part of almost every plausible moral theory.

The nature of the evidence could be either qualitative or quantitative, and the things you mention in "implications" are generally quantitative.

• Assessing the quality of the people behind a project is qualitative rather than quantitative.
• Room for more funding is in principle quantitative, but my experience has been that in practice, room for more funding analysis ends up being more qualitative, as you have to make judgments about things such as who would otherwise have funded the project, which hinge heavily on knowledge of the philanthropic landscape in respects that aren't easily quantified.
• Gauging historical precedent requires many judgment calls, and so can't be quantified.
• Deciding what giving opportunities one can learn the most from can't be quantified.

In terms of "good done per dollar" - for me that figure is still far greater than I began with (and I take it that that's the question that EAs are concerned with, rather than "lives saved per dollar"). [...] because, in my initial analysis - and in what I'd presume are most people's initial analyses - benefits to the long-term future weren't taken into account, or weren't thought to be morally relevant.

I explicitly address this in the second paragraph of the "The history of GiveWell’s estimates for lives saved per dollar" section of my post as well as the "Donating to AMF has benefits beyond saving lives" section of my post.

Building a movement of people who are aiming to do the most good with their marginal resources, and who are trying to work out how best to do that, strikes me as a good way to achieve both of these things.

I agree with this. I don't think that my post suggests otherwise.

Good post, Jonah. You say that: "effective altruists should spend much more time on qualitative analysis than on quantitative analysis in determining how they can maximize their positive social impact". What do you mean by "qualitative analysis"? As I understand it, your points are: i) The amount by which you should regress to your prior is much greater than you had previously thought, so ii) you should favour robustness of evidence more than you had previously. But that doesn't favour qualitative vs non-qualitative evidence. It favours more robust evidence of lower but good cost-effectiveness over less robust evidence of higher cost-effectiveness. The nature of the evidence could be either qualitative or quantitative, and the things you mention in "implications" are generally quantitative.

In terms of "good done per dollar" - for me that figure is still far greater than I began with (and I take it that that's the question that EAs are concerned with, rather than "lives saved per dollar"). This is because, in my initial analysis - and in what I'd presume are most people's initial analyses - benefits to the long-term future weren't taken into account, or weren't thought to be morally relevant. But those (expected) benefits strike me, and strike most people I've spoken with who agree with the moral relevance of them, to be far greater than the short-term benefits to the person whose life is saved. So, in terms of my expectations about how much good I can do in the world, I'm able to exceed those by a far greater amount than I'd previously thought likely. And that holds true whether it costs $2000 or $20000 to save a life. I'm not mentioning that either to criticise or support your post, but just to highlight that the lesson to take from past updates on evidence can look quite different depending on whether you're talking about "good done per dollar" or "lives saved per dollar", and the former is what we ultimately care about.

Final point: Something you don't mention is that, when you find out that your evidence is crappier than you'd thought, two general lessons are to pursue things with high option value and to pay to gain new evidence (though I acknowledge that this depends crucially on how much new evidence you think you'll be able to get). Building a movement of people who are aiming to do the most good with their marginal resources, and who are trying to work out how best to do that, strikes me as a good way to achieve both of these things.

In what ways does this differ from Nozick's recommendation in Nature of Rationality where he combines the results from EDT and CDT but gives them different weights depending on the priors (about the applicability to the situation and truth value of each decision theory)?

Sorry if this is an uncomfortable question, but does your theory do anything UDT doesn't do? Or is the idea that this is a general process which both humans and AIs would use if a flaw in UDT is found, and if so, how does it differ from Nick Bostrom's parliamentary decision process? Wouldn't almost any AI or human which endorsed this theory be vulnerable to Pascal's Mugging because at least one subtheory woudl be vulnerable to it?

(part 3; final part)

Second: The GWWC Pledge. You say:

“The GWWC site, for example, claims that from 291 members there will be £72.68M pledged. This equates to £250K / person over the course of their life. Claiming that this level of pledging will occur requires either unreasonable rates of donation or multi-decade payment schedules. If, in line with GWWC's projections, around 50% of people will maintain their donations, then assuming a linear drop off the expected pledge from a full time member is around £375K. Over a lifetime, this is essentially £10K / year. It seems implausible that expected mean annual earnings for GWWC members is of order £100K.”

Again, there are quite a few mistakes:

First, in comments you twice say that “£112.8M” has been pledged rather than “$112.8M”. I know that’s just a typo but it’s an important one.

Second, you say that the GWWC site claims that, “there will be £72.68M pledged” (future tense). It doesn’t, it says, “$112.8mn pledged” (past tense). It’s a pretty important difference – the pledging is something that has happened, not something that will happen. This might partly explain the confusion discussed in point 4, below. Third, and more substantively, you don’t consider the idea, raised in other comments, that some donors might be donating considerably more than 10%, or that some donors might be donating considerably more than the mean. Both are true of GWWC pledgers.

Fourth, you seem to wilfully misunderstand the verb ‘to pledge’. I regularly make the following statement: “I have pledged to give everything I earn above £20 000 p.a. [PPP and inflation-adjusted to Oxford 2009]”. Am I lying when I say that? Using synonyms, I could have said “I promise to give…”, “I commit to give…” or “I sincerely intend to give…”. None of these entail “I am certain that I will donate everything above £20 000 p.a.”. Using my belief that I will earn on average over £42 000 p.a. [PPP and inflation-adjusted to Oxford 2009] over the course of my life, and that I will work until I’m 68, I can infer that I’ve pledged to give over £1 000 000 over the course of my life, which is also something I say. Am I lying when I say that? (Also note that if only 73 people made the same pledge as me, then we would have jointly pledged the current GWWC amount).

Fifth, I don’t know why you took us to use the $100mn pledged figure as an estimate of our impact. In fact you had evidence to the contrary. In a blog post that you cite I said: “As of last March, we’d invested $170 000’s worth of volunteer time into Giving What We Can, and had moved $1.7 million to GiveWell or GWWC top-recommended development charities, and raised a further $68 million in pledged donations. Taking into account the facts that some proportion of this would have been given anyway, there will be some member attrition, and not all donations will go to the very best charities (and using data for all these factors when possible), we estimate that we had raised $8 in realised donations and $130 in future donations for every $1’s worth of volunteer time invested in Giving What We Can.” (emphasis added).

Finally, I think that the GWWC pledge is misleading only if it’s taken to be a measure of our impact. But we don’t advertise it as that. We could try to make it some other number. We could adjust the number downwards, in order to take into account: how much would have been given anyway; member attrition; a discount rate. Or we could adjust the number upwards, in order to take into account: overgiving; real growth of salaries, and inflation. It could also be adjusted downward to take into account that not all donations are to GW or GWWC recommended charities, or (perhaps) upwards to take into account the idea that we will have better evidence about the best giving opportunities in a few years’ time, and thereby be able to donate to charities better than AMF, SCI or DtW. But any number we gave based on these adjustments would be more misleading and arbitrary than the literal amount pledged. It would also be more confusing for the large majority of our website viewers who haven’t thought about things like counterfactual giving or whether the discount rate should be positive or negative over the next few years; they’re used to the social norm which is to advertise pledges as stated. Until you, no-one who does understand issues such as counterfactual giving and discount rates has understood the amount pledged figure as an impact-assessment.

In comments there was some uncertainty about how we come up with the total pledged figure. What we do is as follows. Each member, when they return their pledge form, states a) what percentage they commit to (or, if taking the Further Pledge, the baseline income above which they give everything); b) their birthdate; c) their expected average earnings per annum. Assuming a (conservative) standard retirement age, that allows us to calculate their expected donations. In some cases, members understandably don’t want to reveal their expected earnings. What we used to do, in such cases, is to use the mean earnings of all the other members who have given their incomes. However, when, recently, one member joined with very large expected earnings (pursuing earning to give), we raised the question whether this method suffers from sample bias, because people who expect to earn a lot will be more likely to report. I’m not sure that’s true: I could imagine that people who earn more often don’t want to flaunt that fact. However, wanting to be conservative, we decided instead to use the mean earnings of the country in which the member works.

Bottom Line for Readers If you’re interested in the question of whether 80,000 Hours and Giving What We Can have acted optimally or will act optimally in the future, the answer is simple: certainly not. We inevitably do some things worse than we could have done, and we value your input on concrete suggestions about how our organisations can improve.

If you’re interested in the question of whether $1 invested in 80,000 Hours or Giving What We Can produces more than $1’s worth of value for the best causes, read here, here, here and here and, most of all, contact me for the calculations and, if you’d like, our latest business plan, at will dot crouch at 80000hours.org. So far, I haven’t seen any convincing arguments to the conclusion that we fail to have a ROI greater than 1; however, it’s something I’d love additional input on, as the outside view makes me wary about believing that I work for the best charity I know of.