| This is a Draft Amnesty Day draft. That means it’s not polished, it’s probably not up to my standards, the ideas are not thought out, I haven’t checked everything, and it's unfinished. I was explicitly encouraged to post something like this! |
| Commenting and feedback guidelines: I’m going with the default — please be nice. But constructive feedback is appreciated; please let me know what you think is wrong. Feedback on the structure of the argument is also appreciated. |
I am becoming increasingly concerned that EA is neglecting experts when it comes to research. I’m not saying that EA organisations don’t produce high quality research, but I have a feeling that the research could be of an even higher quality if we were to embrace experts more.
Epistemic status: not that confident that what I’m saying is valid. Maybe experts are utilised more than I realise. Maybe the people I mention below can reasonably be considered experts. I also haven’t done an in-depth exploration of all relevant research to judge how widespread the problem might be (if it is indeed a problem)
Research examples I’m NOT concerned by
Let me start with some good examples (there are certainly more than I am listing here!).
In 2021 Open Phil commissioned a report from David Humbird on the potential for cultured meat production to scale up to the point where it would be sufficiently available and affordable to replace a substantial portion of global meat consumption. Humbird has a PhD in chemical engineering and has extensive career experience in process engineering and techno-economic analysis, including the provision of consultancy services. In short, he seems like a great choice to carry out this research.
Another example I am pleased by is Will MacAskill as author of What We Owe the Future. I cannot think of a better author of this book. Will is a respected philosopher, and a central figure in the EA movement. This book outlines the philosophical argument for longtermism, a key school of thought within EA. Boy am I happy that Will wrote this book.
Other examples I was planning to write up:
- Modeling the Human Trajectory - David Roodman
- Roodman seems qualified to deliver this research.
- Wild Animal Initiative research such as this
- I like that they collaborated with Samniqueka J. Halsey who is an assistant professor
Some examples I’m concerned by
Open Phil’s research on AI
In 2020 Ajeya Cotra, a Senior Research Analyst at Open Phil, wrote a report on timelines to transformative AI. I have no doubt that the report is high-quality and that Ajeya is very intelligent. However, this is a very technical subject and, beyond having a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, I don’t see why Ajeya would be the first choice to write this report. Why wouldn’t Open Phil have commissioned an expert in AI development / computational neuroscience etc. to write this report, similar to what they did with David Humbird (see above)? Ajeya’s report had Paul Christiano and Dario Amodei as advisors, which is good, but advisors generally have limited input. Wouldn’t it have been better to have an expert as first author?
All the above applies to another Open Phil AI report, this time written by Joe Carlsmith. Joe is a philosopher by training, and whilst that isn’t completely irrelevant, it once again seems to me that a better choice could have been found. Personally I’d prefer that Joe do more philosophy-related work, similar to what Will MacAsKill is doing (see above).
Climate Change research
(removed mention of Founder's Pledge as per jackva's comment)
- Climate Change and Longtermism - John Halstead
- John Halstead doesn't seem to have any formal training in climate science. Not sure if this is an issue though if he's got up to speed in his own time, but I wonder if a professor of climate science would have been a better choice to write this book.
Related to what others (e.g., harfe) have already commented, it seems a sad truth that many domain experts reason poorly as soon as you go slightly outside the prevalent framings of their domain. For instance, someone may have a good track record improving current-day ML systems but lack interest in forecasting anything that's several years in the future. Or they may not be thinking about questions like whether particular trends break around the time ML systems become situationally aware of being in "training" (because we're far away from this, so it has never happened thus far.) If domain-experts had a burning desire to connect their expertise to "What's important for the course of the future of humanity?" and get things right, get to the truth, they'd already be participating more in EA discourse. Which isn't to say that everyone with an interest in these topics would endorse the conclusions prevalent within EA – but at least they'd be familiar with these conclusions and the arguments. The fact that they're only domain experts, and not also existing contributors to EA discourse, is often evidence that they on some level lack interest in the questions at hand. (In practice, this often manifests itself as them saying stupid things when they get dragged into a discussion, but more fundamentally, the reason for this is because they massively underestimate the depth behind EA thinking simply because it's outside their plate and because they lack a burning desire to think through big-picture questions.)
FWIW, I think Open Phil often commissioned domain experts to review their reports. (They probably tried to select experts who are interested enough in EA thinking to engage with it carefully, so this creates a selection effect, which you could argue introduces a bias. But the counterargument is that it's no use commissioning experts who you expect will misrepresent your work when they review it. So you want to select experts who've previously engaged intelligently with shorter version of the argument – and that sadly disqualifies a significant portion of narrow-domain experts.)