EA Forum Reader

This sounds like a misunderstanding to me. Longtermists concerned with short AI timelines are concerned with them because of AI's long lasting influence into the far future.

As an update, I am working on a full post that will excerpt 20 arguments against working to improve the long-term future and/or working to reduce existential risk as well as responses to those arguments. The post itself is currently at 26,000 words and there are six planned comments (one of which will add 10 additional arguments) that together are currently at 11,000 words. There have been various delays in my writing process but I now think that is good because there have been several new and important arguments that have been developed in the past year. My goal is to begin circulating the draft for feedback within three months.

Similar with what you're saying about AI alignment being preparadigmatic, a major reason why trying to prove the Riemann conjecture head-on would be a bad idea is that people have already been trying to do that for a long time without success. I expect the first people to consider the conjecture approached it directly, and were reasonable to do so.

Can you please add the tag directory to the sidebar?

I am skeptical of this line of reasoning because I see little reason to believe that malevolence determined the policies in question. Game theory political scientists argue that different institutional structures make it rational or irrational for leaders to distribute public goods or targeted goods, practice repression, allow political parties. For a more in depth treatment, see the Dictator's Handbook by Bruce Bueno De Meqsuita and Alistair Smith. Their core argument is that because dictators must appease a very small group of powerful interest leaders (generals for Mussolini, members of the centcom for Stalin, tribal and military leaders for the Abdullah II) they can protect their power by rewarding only that small group at the expense of the masses.

Here is an illustrative example of political phenomena that is difficult to explain from the leaders personality. Torture is more common in multi-party autocracies than in one-party states. If the leaders narcissism strongly influences policies and narcissism and sadism are strongly correlated, then we would expect torture to be more common in states that ban dissent. Suppose that torture is not about satisfying the personal desire of the dictator and is instead about policing dissent. Now it makes sense that if some dissent (like resistance to a new "non-security" policy) is allowed, there must be some boundary into banned dissent. Then the occurrence of torture in multi-party states makes more sense and the rarity of torture in the most severe autocracies makes sense.

Opposing personality-of-dictator explanations to ideological explanations surprised me because it ignored the strongest explanations in institutional structures of states and in political cultures. Possibly you emphasized ideology because your samples are older. While the early modernist dictators were authentically ideological, most modern autocrats espouse a bland, centrist, syncretic corporatism. Dictators like Chavez and Castro are the exception today (although their ideology does influence behavior). Here is an article which argues most dictatorships are interest driven, not ideologically driven https://sci-hub.tw/10.1080/13510347.2017.1307823

Hi Zach,

Thanks for your comment. Measuring and comparing welfare across species is a tremendous theoretical and practical challenge. For measuring capacity for welfare, we would want to get a rough sense of the range of physical pain and pleasure an animal can experience as well as the range of emotional pain and pleasure an animal can experience. We would also want to know the degree to which physical and emotional pain/pleasure contribute to overall welfare, and this may differ by species. (We will need to account for combination effects: among other things, "stacking" one unit of physical pain on top of one unit of emotional pain may create more or less than two units of overall suffering.) All else being equal, if two animals have the same range of possible physical pains and pleasures, but animal A has a greater range of possible emotional pains and pleasures than animal B, we would expect animal A to have a greater capacity for welfare than animal B.

One thing to keep in mind is that what ultimately matters morally is realized welfare, not capacity for welfare. In many instances, judging the effectiveness of an intervention will require looking at species-specific differences in the way welfare is realized. Two animals may have the same overall capacity for welfare, and they may be subject to the same conditions (solitary confinement, say), but species-specific differences (one is a social animal and the other is not, say) may indicate that one animal suffers much more than the other in those conditions.

Nonetheless, I do believe thinking about capacity for welfare will help increase the efficiency with which our resources are allocated across interventions, especially when applied to big-picture questions, like "What percentage of our resources should ideally go to fish or crustaceans or insects?"

Great post, and I'm excited to see RP work on this. I have great confidence in your carefulness about this.

A concern I have with pretty much every approach to weighting welfare across species is that it seems like the correct weights may depend on the type of experience. For example, I could imagine the intensity of physical pain being very similar across species but the severity of depression from not being able to move to vary greatly.

Is there a way to allow for this within the approach you lay out here?

My impression from CAF's webpage on their Charity Accounts was that the 4% fee was a one-off when you contribute money to the account, rather than an annual fee on the balance. However it's not very clear and your interpretation definitely makes sense too. Is anyone's knowledge from a source other than the website?

Thank you for your thoughtful feedback. I've thought about the points you raise and I think they are all good challenges. I agree that Cummings raises interesting and relevant points in a range of areas.

I think you and I have different views on several points. The most important one seems to be that I think the piece at times aspires to represent the whole, even as a sketch ('An Odyssean education'). And my view is that two of the most important areas (if I were writing such an essay) would be voting and political systems, and climate change, neither of which I feel get sufficient attention in the piece. It seems that on each of these topics you take a different viewpoint, which I respect. Again, thanks for your feedback. Unless there's much else you think we can do to resolve this difference, I'd probably leave it there.

My broader point is something like: in a discussion about deference and skepticism, it feels odd to only discuss deference to other EAs. By conflating "EA experts" and "people with good opinions", you're missing an important dimension of variation (specifically, the difference between a community-centred outside view and a broader outside view).

Apologies for phrasing the original comment as a "gotcha" rebuttal rather than trying to distill a more constructive criticism.