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Thanks for this piece, I thought it was interesting!

A small error I noticed while reading through one of the references is that the line "For example, France’s GDP per capita is around 60% of US GDP per capita.[7]" is incorrectly summarizing the cited material. The value needs to be 67% to make this sentence correct. The relevant section in the underlying material is: "As an example, suppose we wish to compare living standards in France and the United States. GDP per person is markedly lower in France: France had a per capita GDP in 2005 of just 67 percent of the U.S. value. Consumption per person in France was even lower — only 60 percent of the U.S., even adding government consumption to private consumption."

I think there are problems with the study that article is based on, as outlined here:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/4/18650969/married-women-miserable-fake-paul-dolan-happiness

"The problem? That finding is the result of a grievous misunderstanding on Dolan’s part of how the American Time Use Survey works. The people conducting the survey didn’t ask married people how happy they were, shoo their spouses out of the room, and then ask again. Dolan had misinterpreted one of the categories in the survey, “spouse absent,” which refers to married people whose partner is no longer living in their household, as meaning the spouse stepped out of the room."

To be fair, the author of the original study still believes that married women are less happy, even after realizing this mistake, but others disagree and think the evidence does not point that way.

Thanks for the recommendation. I'm taking a development economics course/paper at my university at the moment and have been a bit disappointed in the quality of the teaching. I might check these out as a supplement/extension at some point.

Dating apps have misaligned incentives. A dating app run as a non profit could plausibly out compete on the metric of successful couple formation.

I also found that passage odd, though I think for a somewhat different reason (or at least with a different framing).

For me, the passage reminded me of the O-ring theory of economic development, "which proposes that tasks of production must be executed proficiently together in order for any of them to be of high value".

For the sake of the argument, let's make the very extreme and unlikely assumption that, if no longtermists worked on them, each of AI risk, biorisk, and nuclear war would by themselves be enough to guarantee an existential catastrophe that reduces the value of the future to approximately 0. In that case, we might say that the EV of the future is ~0, and even if we were to totally fix one of those problems, or even two of them, the EV would still be ~0. Therefore, the EV of working on any one or two of the problems, viewed in isolation, is 0. But the EV of fixing all three would presumably be astronomical.

We could maybe say that existential catastrophe in this scenario is overdetermined, and so we need to remove multiple risks in order for catastrophe to actually not happen. This might naively make it look like many individual prevention efforts were totally worthless, and it might indeed mean that they are worthless if the other efforts don't happen, but it's still the case that, altogether, that collection of efforts is extremely valuable.

This also sort-of reminds me of some of 80k/Ben Todd's comments on attributing impact, e.g.:

A common misconception is that the credit for an action can’t add up to more than 100%. But it’s perfectly possible for both people to be responsible. Suppose Amy and Bob see someone drowning. Amy performs CPR while Bob calls the ambulance. If Amy wasn’t there to perform CPR, the person would have died while Bob called the ambulance. If Bob wasn’t there, the ambulance wouldn’t have arrived in time. Both Amy and Bob saved a life, and it wouldn’t have happened if either was there. So, both are 100% responsible.

I haven't taken the time to work through how well this point holds up when instead each x-risk causes less than 100%, e.g. 10%, chance of existential catastrophe if there were no longtermists working on it. But it seems plausible that there could be more than 100% worth of x-risks, if we add it up across the centuries/millenia, such that, naively, any specified effort to reduce x-risks that doesn't by itself reduce the total risk to less than 100% appears worthless.

So I think the point that, in a sense, only so many things can reduce the EV of the future by 10% does highlight that work on AI risk might be less valuable that one would naively think, if we expect other people/generations to drop the ball on other issues. But if we instead view this like a situation where there's a community of people working on AI risk, another working on biorisk, another working on nuclear, future generations working on whatever risks come up then, etc., then it seems totally possible that each community has to fix their problem. And so then it makes sense for our generation to work on the issues we can work on now, and more specifically for people with a comparative advantage for AI to work on that, those with a comparative advantage for general great power war reduction to work on that, etc.

So Paul's statement there seems to sort-of hold up as a partial argument for reducing focus on AI risk, but in a specific way (to ensure we also patch all the other leaks too). It doesn't seem like it holds up as an argument that AI safety work is less valuable than we thought in a simple sense, such that we should redirect efforts to non-longtermist work.

(I'm not saying Paul specifically intended to have the latter implication, but I think it'd be easy to make that inference from what he said, at least as quoted here. I'm also not sure if I'm right or if I've expressed myself well, and I'd be interested in other people's thoughts.)

Dating apps and matching are not neglected, but for some reason this more deliberate experimental approach seems largely ignored.

I'm pretty convinced by Kelsey's summary here of why Paul Dolan's methods were substantively lacking: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/4/18650969/married-women-miserable-fake-paul-dolan-happiness

Kelsey has stronger words on (public) Facebook.

Another point against tractability is that you're in some important ways directly fighting against evolution.

N=1, but I enjoyed reading the Autobiography of John Stuart Mill.

I think one possible point against tractability is that many countries have been trying to work on similar things as a means to increase population.

However, the flip side to this is that if you were to come up with a clever intervention, these countries could act as large non-EA buyers.

Some possibly relevant links: https://www.quora.com/Are-there-countries-which-encourage-their-population-to-increase https://www.economist.com/asia/2019/10/03/japans-state-owned-version-of-tinder https://www.businessinsider.com/japanese-government-dating-services-2016-10?r=US&IR=T https://www.vox.com/2016/5/23/11440638/child-benefit-child-allowance https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/33485/6-creative-ways-countries-have-tried-their-birth-rates https://www.dw.com/en/france-moves-to-encourage-large-families/a-1720921

I remember seeing some other writing on dating apps in general. I think among smart tech people I know there is some agreement that dating apps could be improved a whole lot. That said, it is difficult to make money from them, so it's not incredibly exciting as a business venture.