Buck's Quick takes

I worry sometimes that EAs aren’t sufficiently interested in learning facts about the world that aren’t directly related to EA stuff.

I share this concern, and I think a culture with more book reviews is a great way to achieve that (I've been happy to see all of Michael Aird's book summaries for that reason).

CEA briefly considered paying for book reviews (I was asked to write this review as a test of that idea). IIRC, the goal at the time was more about getting more engagement from people on the periphery of EA by creating EA-related content they'd find interesting for other reasons. But book reviews as a push toward levelling up more involved people // changing EA culture is a different angle, and one I like a lot.

One suggestion: I'd want the epistemic spot checks, or something similar, to be mandatory. Many interesting books fail the basic test of "is the author routinely saying true things?", and I think a good truth-oriented book review should check for that.

Yeah, I really like this. SSC currently already has a book-review contest running on SSC, and maybe LW and the EAF could do something similar? (Probably not a contest, but something that creates a bit of momentum behind the idea of doing this)

I'd be interested in this. I've been posting book reviews of the books I read to Facebook - mostly for my own benefit. These have mostly been written quickly, but if there was a decent chance of getting $500 I could pick out the most relevant books and relisten to them and then rewrite them.

Perhaps it would be worthwhile to focus on books like those in this list of "most commonly planned to read books that have not been read by anyone yet"

I would also ask these people to optionally write  or improve a summary of the book in Wikipedia if it has an Wikipedia article (or should have one). In many cases, it's not only EAs who would do more good if they knew ideas in a given book, especially when it's on a subject like pandemics or global warming rather than topics relevant to non-altruistic work too like management or productivity. When you google a book, Wikipedia is often the first result and so these articles receive a quite lot of traffic (you can see here how much traffic a given article receives). 

I've thought about this before and I would also like to see this happen.

Yeah, this seems good to me. 

I also just think in any case more people should post their notes, key takeaways, and (if they make them) Anki cards to the Forum, as either top-level posts or shortforms. I think this need only take ~30 mins of extra time on top of the time they spend reading or note-taking or whatever for their own benefit. (But doing what you propose would still add value by incentivising more effortful and even more useful versions of this.)

There are many topics where I’d love to know the basic EA-relevant takeaways [...]

The main takeaways that relate to vastly improving the world, with emphasis on the surprising ones

Yeah, I think this is worth emphasising, since:

• Those are things existing, non-EA summaries of the books are less likely to provide
• Those are things that even another EA reading the same book might not think of
  • Coming up with key takeaways is an analytical exercise and will often draw on specific other knowledge, intuitions, experiences, etc. the reader has

Also, readers of this shortform may find posts tagged effective altruism books interesting.

You can already pay for book reviews - what would make these different?

Quick take is this sounds like a pretty good bet, mostly for the indirect effects. You could do it with a 'contest' framing instead of a 'I pay you to produce book reviews' framing; idk whether that's meaningfully better.

I don't think it's crazy at all. I think this sounds pretty good.

Huh, interesting thoughts, have you looked into the actual motivations behind it more? I'd've guessed that there was little "big if true" thinking in alchemy and mostly hopes for wealth and power.

Another thought, I suppose alchemy was more technical than something like magical potion brewing and in that way attracted other kinds of people, making it more proto-scientific? Another similar comparison might be sincere altruistic missionaries that work on finding the "true" interpretation of the bible/koran/..., sharing their progress in understanding it and working on convincing others to save them.

Regarding pushing chemnistry being easier than longtermism, I'd have guessed the big reasons why pushing scientific fields is easier are the possibility of repeating experiments and profitability of the knowledge. Are there really longtermists who find it plausible we can only work on x-risk stuff around the hinge? Even patient longtermists seem to want to save resources and I suppose invest in other capacity building. Ah, or do you mean "it's only possible to *directly* work on x-risk stuff", vs. indirectly? It just seemed odd to suggest that everything longtermists have done so far has not affected the probability of eventual x-risk, in the very least it has set in motion the longtermism movement earlier and shaping the culture and thinking style and so forth via institutions like FHI.

...I don't have time to write the full post right now

I'm eager to read the full post, or any expansion on what makes you think that groups should actively discourage newbies from take the Pledge.

I'd be pretty interested in you writing this up. I think it could cause some mild changes in the way I treat my salary.

Hi Buck,

I’m very sorry to hear that you regret taking The Pledge and feel that the EA community in 2014 should have actively discouraged you from taking it in the first place.

If you believe it’s better for you and the world that you unpledge then you should feel free to do so. I also strongly endorse this statement from the 2017 post that KevinO quoted:

“The spirit of the Pledge is not to stop you from doing more good, and is not to lead you to ruin. If you find that it’s doing either of these things, you should probably break the Pledge.”

I would very much appreciate hearing further details about why you feel as strongly as you do about actively discouraging other people from taking The Pledge and the way this is done circa 2021.

Last year we collaborated with group leaders and CEA groups team to write a new guide to promoting GWWC within local and university groups (comment using this link). In that guide we tried to be pretty clear about the things to be careful of such as proposing that younger adults be encouraged to consider taking a trial pledge first if that is more appropriate for them (while also respecting their agency as adults) – there are many more people taking this option as of 2021 compared with 2014 (~50% vs ~25% respectively). We also find that most new members these days started by giving first before making a pledge, and this is something that we actively encourage and will be further developing during 2022.

Personally, I’ve found giving to be something that has been very meaningful to me during my entire involvement in EA and that The Pledge was a way of formalising that in a meaningful, motivating and sustainable way. My experience isn’t dissimilar to what we hear regularly from many members, and it has also been demonstrated by the various EA surveys (including the recent one by Open Philanthropy) which show GWWC to be a strong way in which people engage with EA (it was one of the top ranked for positive to negative engagement ratio).

However, I certainly don’t want to diminish any negative experiences that you or anyone else has had in the past and it is very important to me that we learn carefully how to get the most positive outcomes.

I’d be more than happy to talk further about this on a call, or by email, or to continue the discussion on this thread.

From "Clarifying the Giving What We Can pledge" in 2017 (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/drJP6FPQaMt66LFGj/clarifying-the-giving-what-we-can-pledge#How_permanent_is_the_Pledge__)

"""
How permanent is the Pledge? 

The Pledge is a promise, or oath, to be made seriously and with every expectation of keeping it. But if someone finds that they can no longer keep the Pledge (for instance due to serious unforeseen circumstances), then they can simply contact us, discuss the matter if need be, and cease to be a member. They can of course rejoin later if they renew their commitment.

Some of us find the analogy of marriage a helpful one: you make a promise with firm intent, you make life plans based on it, you structure things so that it’s difficult to back out of, and you commit your future self to doing something even if you don’t feel like it at the time. But at the same time, there’s a chance that things will change so drastically that you will break this tie.

Breaking the Pledge is not something to be done for reasons of convenience, or simply because you think your life would be better if you had more money. But we believe there are two kinds of situations where it’s acceptable to withdraw from the Pledge.

One situation is when it would impose extreme costs for you. If you find yourself in hardship and don’t have any way to donate what you committed to while maintaining a reasonable quality of life for yourself and your dependants, this is a good reason to withdraw your Pledge. (Note that during unemployment you donate only 1% of spending money, as described under “Circumstances that change the Pledge” below.)

The other is when you find that you have an option to do more good. For example, imagine you pledged and are now deciding whether to found a nonprofit (which will take all your financial resources) or keep your “day job” in order to be able to donate 10%. If you have good reason to believe that the nonprofit will do significantly more good than the donations, that founding the nonprofit is not compatible with donating 10% of your income, and that you would not be able to make up the gap in donations within a couple of years, withdrawing your Pledge would be a reasonable thing to do. 

The spirit of the Pledge is not to stop you from doing more good, and is not to lead you to ruin. If you find that it’s doing either of these things, you should probably break the Pledge.

We understand that some people have a very strong definition of “pledge” as meaning something that must not be broken under any circumstances. If this is your sense of the word, and you wouldn’t want to take a pledge if there were any chance of you being unable to keep it, you might find that Try Giving on an ongoing basis is a better fit for you.
"""
 

I regret taking the pledge

I feel like you should be able to "unpledge" in that case, and further I don't think you should feel shame or face stigma for this. There's a few reasons I think this:

• You're working for an EA org. If you think your org is ~as effective as where you'd donate, it doesn't make sense for them to pay you money that you then donate (unless if you felt there was some psychological benefit to this, but clearly you feel the reverse)
• The community has a LOT of money now. I'm not sure what your salary is, but I'd guess it's lower than optimal given community resources, so you donating money to the community pot is probably the reverse of what I'd want.
• I don't want the community to be making people feel psychologically worse, and insofar as it is, I want an easy out for them. Therefore, I want people in your situation in general to unpledge and not feel shame or face stigma. My guess is that if you did so, you'd be sending a signal to others that doing so is acceptable. 
• You signed the pledge under a set of assumptions which appear to no longer hold (eg., about how you'd feel about the pledge years out, how much money the community would have, etc)
• I'm generally pro-[people being able to "break contract" and similar without facing large penalties] (other than paying damages, but damages here would be zero since presumably no org made specific plans on the assumption that you'd continue to follow the pledge) – this reduces friction in making contracts to begin with and allows for more dynamism. Yes, a "pledge" in some ways has more meaning than a contract, but seeing as you (apparently) made the pledge relatively hastily (and perhaps under pressure from other? I find this unclear from your post), it doesn't seem like it was appropriate for you to have been making a lifelong commitment to the pledge, and I think we as a community should recognize that and adjust our response accordingly.

I strongly agree that local groups should encourage people to give for a couple years before taking the GWWC Pledge, and that the Pledge isn't right for everyone (I've been donating 10% since childhood and have never taken the pledge).

When it comes to the 'Further Giving' Pledge, I think it wouldn't be unreasonable to encourage people to get some kind of pre-Pledge counselling or take a pre-Pledge class, to be absolutely certain people have thought through the implications of the commitment they are making .

I remember there being some sort of text saying you should try a 1% donation for a few years first to check you're happy making the pledge. Perhaps this issue has been resolved since you joined? 

1. At an object level, I don't think I've noticed the dynamic particularly strongly on the EA Forum (as opposed to eg. social media). I feel like people are generally pretty positive about each other/the EA project (and if anything are less negative than is perhaps warranted sometimes?). There are occasionally low-quality critical posts (that to some degree reads to me as status plays) that pop up, but they usually get downvoted fairly quickly.

2. At a meta level, I'm not sure how to get around the problem of having a low bar for criticism in general. I think as an individual it's fairly hard to get good feedback without also being accepting of bad feedback, and likely something similar is true of groups as well?

I feel like an easy way to get lots of upvotes is to make lots of vague critical comments about how EA isn’t intellectually rigorous enough, or inclusive enough, or whatever. This makes me feel less enthusiastic about engaging with the EA Forum, because it makes me feel like everything I’m saying is being read by a jeering crowd who just want excuses to call me a moron.

Could you unpack this a bit? Is it the originating poster who makes you feel that there's a jeering crowd, or the people up-voting the OP which makes you feel the jeers?

As counterbalance...

Writing, and sharing your writing, is how you often come to know your own thoughts. I often recognise the kernel of truth someone is getting at before they've articulated it well, both in written posts and verbally. I'd rather encourage someone for getting at something even if it was lacking, and then guide them to do better. I'd especially prefer to do this given I personally know that it's difficult to make time to perfect a post whilst doing a job and other commitments.

This is even more the case when it's on a topic that hasn't been explored much, such as biases in thinking common to EAs or diversity issues. I accept that in liberal circles being critical on basis of diversity and inclusion or cognitive biases is a good signalling-win, and you might think it would follow suit in EA. But I'm reminded of what Will MacAskill said about 8 months ago on an 80k podcast that he was awake thinking his reputation would be in tatters after posting in the EA forum, that his post would be torn to shreds (didn't happen). For quite some time I was surprised at the diversity elephant in the room on EA, and welcomed when these critiques came forward. But I was in the room and not pointing out the elephant for a long time because I - like Will - had fears about being torn to shreds for putting myself out there, and I don't think this is unusual.

I also think that criticisms of underlying trends in groups are really difficult to get at in a substantive way, and though they often come across as put-downs from someone who wants to feel bigger, it is not always clear whether that's due to authorial intent or reader's perception. I still think there's something that can be taken from them though. I remember a scathing article about yuppies who listen to NPR to feel educated and part of the world for signalling purposes. It was very mean-spirited but definitely gave me food for thought on my media consumption and what I am (not) achieving from it. I think a healthy attitude for a community is willingness to find usefulness in seemingly threatening criticism. As all groups are vulnerable to effects of polarisation and fractiousness, this attitude could be a good protective element.

So in summary, even if someone could have done better on articulating their 'vague critical comments', I think it's good to encourage the start of a conversation on a topic which is not easy to bring up or articulate, but is important. So I would say go on ahead and upvote that criticism whilst giving feedback on ways to improve it. If that person hasn't nailed it, it's started the conversation at least, and maybe someone else will deliver the argument better. And I think there is a role for us as a community to be curious and open to 'vague critical comments' and find the important message, and that will prove more useful than the alternative of shunning it.

I have felt this way as well. I have been a bit unhappy with how many upvotes in my view low quality critiques of mine have gotten (and think I may have fallen prey to a poor incentive structure there). Over the last couple of months I have tried harder to avoid that by having a mental checklist before I post anything but not sure whether I am succeeding. At least I have gotten fewer wildly upvoted comments!

I've upvoted some low quality criticism of EA. Some of this is due to emotional biases or whatever, but a reason I still endorse is that I haven't read strong responses to some obvious criticism.

Example: I currently believe that an important reason EA is slightly uninclusive and moderately undiverse is because EA community-building was targeted at people with a lot of power as a necessary strategic move. Rich people, top university students, etc. It feels like it's worked, but I haven't seen a good writeup of the effects of this.

I think the same low-quality criticisms keep popping up because there's no quick rebuttal. I wish there were a post of "fallacies about problems with EA" that one could quickly link to.

I think that EAs, especially on the EA Forum, are too welcoming to low quality criticism.

can you show one actual example of what exactly you mean?

I agree with this as stated, though I'm not sure how much overlap there is between the things we consider low-quality criticism. (I can think of at least one example where I was mildly annoyed that something got a lot of upvotes, but it seems awkward to point to publicly.)

I'm not so worried about becoming the target of low-quality criticism myself. I'm actually more worried about low-quality criticism crowding out higher-quality criticism. I can definitely think of instances where I wanted to say X but then was like "oh no, if I say X then people will lump this together with some other person saying nearby thing Y in a bad way, so I either need to be extra careful and explain that I'm not saying Y or shouldn't say X after all".

I'm overall not super worried because I think the opposite failure mode, i.e. appearing too unwelcoming of criticism, is worse.

I've proposed before that voting shouldn't be anonymous, and that (strong) downvotes should  require explanation (either your own comment or a link to someone else's). Maybe strong upvotes should, too?

Of course, this is perhaps a bad sign about the EA community as a whole, and fixing forum incentives might hide the issue.

This makes me feel less enthusiastic about engaging with the EA Forum, because it makes me feel like everything I’m saying is being read by a jeering crowd who just want excuses to call me a moron.

How much of this do you think is due to the tone or framing of the criticism rather than just its content (accurate or not)?

I thought the same thing recently.

See my comment here, which applies to this Shortform as well; I think it would be a strong top-level post, and I'd be interested to see how other users felt about tech bootcamps they attended.

This seems like really good advice, thanks for writing this!

Also, I'm compiling a list of CS/ML bootcamps here (anyone should feel free to add items).

Thanks, this is an interesting analogy. 

If too few EAs go into more bespoke roles, then one reason could be risk-aversion. Rightly or wrongly, they may view those paths as more insecure and risky (for them personally; though I expect personal and altruistic risk correlate to a fair degree). If so, then one possibility is that EA funders and institutions/orgs should try to make them less risky or otherwise more appealing (there may already be some such projects).

In recent years, EA has put less emphasis on self-sacrifice, arguing that we can't expect people to live on very little. There may be a parallel to risk - that we can't expect people to take on more risk than they're comfortable with, but instead must make the risky paths more appealing.

I'm commenting on a few Shortforms I think should be top-level posts so that more people see them, they can be tagged, etc. This is one of the clearest cases I've seen; I think the comparison is really interesting, and a lot of people who are promising EA candidates will have "become really rich" as a viable option, such that they'd benefit especially from thinking about this comparisons themselves.

Anyway, would you consider making this a top-level post? I don't think the text would need to be edited all — it could be as-is, plus a link to the Shortform comments.

Something I imagined while reading this was being part of a strangely massive (~1000 person) extended family whose goal was to increase the net wealth of the family. I think it would be natural to join one of the family businesses, it would be natural to make your own startup, and also it would be somewhat natural to provide services for the family that aren't directly about making the money yourself. Helping make connections, find housing, etc.

Thanks for writing this up. At the risk of asking obvious question, I'm interested in why you think entrepreneurship is valuable in EA.

One explanation for why entrepreneurship has high financial returns is information asymmetry/adverse selection: it's hard to tell if someone is a good CEO apart from "does their business do well", so they are forced to have their compensation tied closely to business outcomes (instead of something like "does their manager think they are doing a good job"), which have high variance; as a result of this variance and people being risk-averse, expected returns need to be high in order to compensate these entrepreneurs.

It's not obvious to me that this information asymmetry exists in EA. E.g. I expect "Buck thinks X is a good group leader" correlates better with "X is a good group leader" than "Buck thinks X will be a successful startup" correlates with "X is a successful startup".

It seems like there might be a "market failure" in EA where people can reasonably be known to be doing good work, but are not compensated appropriately for their work, unless they do some weird bespoke thing.

Maybe there's some lesson to be learned. And I do think that EAs should often aspire to be more entrepreneurial.

But maybe the main lesson is for the people trying to get really rich, not the other way round. I imagine both communities have their biases. I imagine that lots of people try entrepreneurial schemes for similar reasons to why lots of people buy lottery tickets. And Id guess that this often has to do with scope neglect, excessive self confidence / sense of exceptionalism, and/or desperation.

I tried searching the literature a bit, as I'm sure that there are studies on the relation between rationality and altruistic behavior. The most relevant paper I found (from about 20 minutes of search and reading) is The cognitive basis of social behavior (2015). It seems to agree with your hypothesis. From the abstract:

Applying a dual-process framework to the study of social preferences, we show in two studies that individuals with a more reflective/deliberative cognitive style, as measured by scores on the Cognitive Reflection Test (CRT), are more likely to make choices consistent with “mild” altruism in simple non-strategic decisions. Such choices increase social welfare by increasing the other person’s payoff at very low or no cost for the individual. The choices of less reflective individuals (i.e. those who rely more heavily on intuition), on the other hand, are more likely to be associated with either egalitarian or spiteful motives. We also identify a negative link between reflection and choices characterized by “strong” altruism, but this result holds only in Study 2. Moreover, we provide evidence that the relationship between social preferences and CRT scores is not driven by general intelligence. We discuss how our results can reconcile some previous conflicting findings on the cognitive basis of social behavior.

Also relevant is This Review (2016) by Rand:

Does cooperating require the inhibition of selfish urges? Or does “rational” self-interest constrain cooperative impulses? I investigated the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation by meta-analyzing 67 studies in which cognitive-processing manipulations were applied to economic cooperation games. My meta-analysis was guided by the social heuristics hypothesis, which proposes that intuition favors behavior that typically maximizes payoffs, whereas deliberation favors behavior that maximizes one’s payoff in the current situation. Therefore, this theory predicts that deliberation will undermine pure cooperation (i.e., cooperation in settings where there are few future consequences for one’s actions, such that cooperating is not in one’s self-interest) but not strategic cooperation (i.e., cooperation in settings where cooperating can maximize one’s payoff). As predicted, the meta-analysis revealed 17.3% more pure cooperation when intuition was promoted over deliberation, but no significant difference in strategic cooperation between more intuitive and more deliberative conditions.

And This Paper (2016) on Belief in Altruism and Rationality claims that 

However, contra our predictions, cognitive reflection was not significantly negatively correlated with belief in altruism (r(285) = .04, p =.52, 95% CI [-.08,.15]).

Where belief in altruism is a measure of how much people believe that other people are acting out of care or compassion to others as opposed to self-interest.

Note: I think that this might be a delicate subject in EA and it might be useful to be more careful about alienating people. I definitely agree that better epistemics is very important to the EA community and to doing good generally and that the ties to the rationalist community probably played (and plays) a very important role, and in fact I think that it is sometimes useful to think of EA as rationality applied to altruism. However, many amazing altruistic people have a totally different view on what would be good epistemics (nevermind the question of "are they right?"), and many people already involved in the EA community seem to have a negative view of (at least some aspects of) the rationality community, both of which call for a more kind and appreciative conversation. 

In this shortform post, the most obvious point where I think that this becomes a problem is the example

For example, I find many animal rights activists very annoying, and if I didn’t feel tied to them by virtue of our shared interest in the welfare of animals, I’d be tempted to sneer at them. 

This is supposed to be an example of a case where people are not behaving rationally since that would stop them from having fun. You could have used a lot of abstract or personal examples where people in their day to day work are not taking time to think something through or seek negative feedback or update their actions based on (noticing when they) update their beliefs. 

The GWWC pledge is akin to a flat tax, as opposed to a progressive tax - which gives you a higher tax rate when you earn more.

I agree that there are some arguments in favour of "progressive donations".

One consideration is that extremely high "donation rates" - e.g. donating 100% of your income above a certain amount - may affect incentives to earn more adversely, depending on your motivations. But in a progressive donation rate system with a more moderate maximum donation rate that would probably not be as much of a problem.

Below this level of consumption, they’ll prefer consuming dollars to donating them, and so they will always consume them. And above it, they’ll prefer donating dollars to consuming them, and so will always donate them. And this is why the GWWC pledge asks you to input the C such that dF(C)/d(C) is 1, and you pledge to donate everything above it and nothing below it.

Wait the standard GWWC pledge is a 10% of your income, presumably based on cultural norms like tithing which in themselves might reflect an implicit understanding that (if we assume log utility) a constant fraction of consumption is equally costly  to any individual, so made for coordination rather than single-player reasons.

But if you already have this coalition value function, you've already solved the coordination problem and there’s no reason to actually calculate the Shapley value! If you know how much total value would be produced if everyone worked together, in realistic situations you must also know an optimal allocation of everyone’s effort. And so everyone can just do what that optimal allocation recommended.

This seems correct

A related claim is that the Shapley value is no better than any other solution to the bargaining problem. For example, instead of allocating credit according to the Shapley value, we could allocate credit according to the rule “we give everyone just barely enough credit that it’s worth it for them to participate in the globally optimal plan instead of doing something worse, and then all the leftover credit gets allocated to Buck”, and this would always produce the same real-life decisions as the Shapley value.

This misses some considerations around cost-efficiency/prioritization. If you look at your distorted "Buck values", you come away that Buck is super cost-effective; responsible for a large fraction of the optimal plan using just one salary. If we didn't have a mechanistic understanding of why that was, trying to get more Buck would become an EA cause area.

In contrast, if credit was allocated according to Shapley values, we could look at the groups whose Shapley value is the highest, and try to see if they can be scaled.

The section about "purely local" Shapley values might be pointing to something, but I don't quite know what it is, because the example is just Shapley values but missing a term? I don't know. You also say "by symmetry...", and then break that symmetry by saying that one of the parts would have been able to create $6,000 in value and the other $0. Needs a crisper example.

Re: coordination between people who have different values using SVs, I have some stuff here, but looking back the writting seems too corny.

Lastly, to some extent, Shapley values are a reaction to people calculating their impact as their counterfactual impact. This leads to double/triple counting impact for some organizations/opportunities, but not others, which makes comparison between them more tricky. Shapley values solve that by allocating impact such that it sums to the total impact & other nice properties. Then someone like OpenPhilanthropy or some EA fund can come and see which groups have the highest Shapley value (perhaps highest Shapley value per unit of money/ressources) and then try to replicate them/scale them. People might also make better decisions if they compare Shapley instead of counterfactual values (because Shapley values mostly give a more accurate impression of the impact of a position.)

So I see the benefits of Shapley values as fixing some common mistakes arising from using counterfactual values. This would make impact accounting slightly better, and coordination slightly better to the extent it relies on impact accounting for prioritization (which tbh might not be much.)

I'm not sure to what extent I agree with the claim that people are overhyping/misunderstanding Shapley values. It seems plausible.

If you tweet about this I'll tag it with @effective_jobs.