Why would they need to shut down completely? It seems like it would work just as well to say "We won't build any new models, but we'll keep serving the ones we already have." Then they wouldn't be accelerating towards riskier models, it wouldn't be AS bad for them financially (so it might have a better chance of happening) and they can still do safety research on the models they already have.
I don't think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that's a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the "high-impact" organizers, as well as the "low-impact" responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason's point is that:
(a) it doesn't make sense to call the organizers "high-impact" and the responsive consumers "low-impact", if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the "organizer" role in our campaigns, we're expecting a bunch of people to take the "responsive consumer" role, even if they don't care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the "responsive consumer" role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don't care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
--
I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn't do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn't cost too much. But I don't really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person "personal boycotts", which I don't think will have much impact.
That is some useful information. It seems like what you're saying is that these campaigns really involve three different groups:
(a) the "inner circle" of 10-100 activists that are organizing the campaign,
(b) some larger number of supporters that are waiting in the wings to execute the threatened protests if the original demands aren't met,
(c) the "audience" of the protests - i.e. this is the general public who will be driven away from the target in response to the protests.
And it's really only group (c) that needs to be big enough as a fraction of the target's total business that the target finds it worth listening to.
Are there any good sources that go into more detail about how these kind of campaigns work? (I'm interested in this in general, not just in relation to this specific post)
I'm a little confused by the claim that "personal choices" aren't effective, but corporate pressure campaigns are. Isn't the way a corporate pressure campaign works that you convince the target that they will be boycotted unless they make the changes you are demanding? So the corporate pressure campaign is only effective if you have people that are willing to change their personal choices. Or am I misunderstanding and that's not how corporate pressure campaigns work?
I think these sorts of critiques don’t just apply to EA - it seems to me like just about any intervention would fall into one of them.
AMF-style interventions that focus on specific problems, like malaria nets? As you discuss, these avoid problems 1 and 2 (because they’re doing a specific thing that wasn’t already being done, so they’re not taking away local jobs or displacing local capacity) but are vulnerable to problem 3 (because the specific thing they’re doing may not be what the locals want)
Maybe organizations could avoid problem 3 by setting up a system to get public input on their projects so they can avoid doing projects that locals don’t want? But expand this out, and at that point you’re basically running (part of) a government - after all, aggregating people’s preferences into decisions is essentially what governments do. (After all, “locals” aren’t a homogeneous group with uniform preferences.) And then you definitely run into all the usual problems with preference aggregation, and you certainly are trying to replace (part of) the local government’s role.
Maybe avoid that by working with the local government or local institutions, rather than setting up your own preference aggregation method? Well, if the problem is that the local government and local institutions are bad or corrupt, that’s certainly not a good idea.
Or maybe your intervention could be targeted directly at improving the institutions? In that case you certainly are saying that you know how to run institutions better than the locals, which goes back into the “we know better than you” dynamic. And I thought part of the problem with colonialism was replacing local institutions that were illegible but functional with institutions that looked better to the colonizers, but didn’t actually work well for locals.
Should you hire locals to work for you? Well in that case you’re displacing those locals away from whatever else they would be doing. Don’t hire locals and bring in your own people instead? Then you’re taking away jobs and ignoring local expertise.
It seems like if you wanted an intervention that avoided all of these kinds of potential problems, it would have to have the following properties:
Locals agree that it would be a good idea
Can be done using local resources and expertise
But also:
Not currently being done locally
Not something that local governments should be doing instead
And I’m having a hard time thinking of any intervention that would fit this bill; if the first two things were true, it seems that would imply that locals would do it or ask their governments to do it.
(Even GiveDirectly-style cash transfers could be argued to have the problem: one could argue that local governments should be giving their citizens cash, so that Acemoglu’s critique about “key services of the state being taken over by other entities” would apply here.)
Two other points of this style of critique that I’m confused about are:
If the argument is “it’s bad to give recipients free/cheap X, because that undermines efforts to produce X locally” isn’t that a general argument for protectionism? If instead of a charity providing X, it was a multinational corporation that had found a way to produce X very cheaply - don’t economists usually say in this sort of situation that trade is a good thing, and the multinational should specialize in X while the locals should specialize in something else? Why is it different when it’s a charity involved?
One of the themes of the “abundance discourse” in the US is that a major problem with US infrastructure projects is that they spend too much time listening to various locals and special interest groups, and bending over backwards to avoid even minor side effects, and not enough time just building the things efficiently. Critique (3) here is sort of the opposite of that - it’s saying that projects need to spend more time listening to locals. It’s not obvious here that “listen to locals more” is good - there are real costs to this approach. Of course the cost-benefit is different in different cases (it’s certainly possible that US projects should listen to locals less, and developing country projects should listen to locals more) I’m just saying that it’s not obvious which direction to go.
I don't have any particular ideas for projects to start in this area, but if there are any projects that are already going on, I might be interested in supporting them. You can contact me to DM if/when you have anything to share!
I am following this issue and, like everyone else here, am also extremely concerned. I am very interested in what I can do right now to help. Are there useful places to donate right now? I am an ETGer who normally gives about $100-200k per year and I would be willing to donate that amount or more if there were a good opportunity.
You mentioned that one harm of insecticide-treated bed nets is that if people use them as fishing nets, that could cause harm to fish stocks. You say that GiveWell didn't take that into account in its cost-effectiveness calculations. But according to e.g. https://blog.givewell.org/2015/02/05/putting-the-problem-of-bed-nets-used-for-fishing-in-perspective/, they did take that into account, they just concluded that the harm was very small in comparison to the benefits. Can you clarify what you meant when you say GiveWell didn't take that into account?
If you're concerned so much about harm to fish stocks, do you think it would make more sense to focus your efforts on supporting charities focused on fish-related issues directly?
GiveWell seems, by your admission, to spend a lot of time thinking about second-order effects and possible harms of their preferred charities' interventions, and your criticism seems that even the amount they do is not sufficient. Okay, that seems fair enough. Do you think there are any charities or philanthropic efforts that do pay sufficient attention to the harms and second-order effects? Or do you think that all philanthropy is like this?
In particular, you talk about your friend Aaron, whose intervention you seem to like. Do you think Aaron thought about the second-order effects and harms of what he was doing? Do you think he's come up with a way of helping others that has less risk of causing harm, and if so is there a way to scale that up?
If GiveWell were to take your advice and focus more on possible harms, is there a risk of overcorrecting, and spending lots of time and resources studying harms that are too small or unlikely to be worth the effort? (Some people think this has already happened in other contexts, e.g. some argue that excessive safety regulation of nuclear power that makes nuclear power plants very expensive to build, even though nuclear power is actually safer than other forms of power)
Sebo and Singer flourish as academics in a white supremacist patriarchal society because others, including people of color and those who identify as women, are pushed down. (p. 135, emphasis added.)
Maybe treading on the oppressed is a crucial part of Singer’s daily writing routine, without which he would never have written a word? If there’s some other reason to believe this wild causal claim, we’re never told what it is.
=============================
Here's a potential more charitable interpretation of this claim. Adams might not be claiming:
"Singer personally performs some act of oppression as part of his writing process."
Adam's causal model might be more of the following:
"Singer's ideas aren't unusually good; there are lots of other people, including people of color and those who identify as women, who have ideas that are as good or better. But those other people are being pushed down (by society in general, not by Singer personally) which leaves that position open for Singer. If people of color and those who identify as women weren't oppressed, then some of them would be able to outcompete Singer, leaving Singer to not flourish as much."
Why would they need to shut down completely? It seems like it would work just as well to say "We won't build any new models, but we'll keep serving the ones we already have." Then they wouldn't be accelerating towards riskier models, it wouldn't be AS bad for them financially (so it might have a better chance of happening) and they can still do safety research on the models they already have.
Did you mean "underestimate how hard it is" rather than "overestimate"? Or are you saying it is easier than people think?
I don't think that the analogy between X-risk work and this kind of protest makes sense.
The reason X-risk work is so impactful is that very few people are working on X-risk at all. As you say, if more people worked on X-risk, the (marginal) impact of each one would be lower, but that's a good thing because more work would be getting done.
The claim being made about the animal welfare activists is that the mechanism of change relies on both the "high-impact" organizers, as well as the "low-impact" responsive consumers who will change their behavior in response to the protests. I think Jason's point is that:
(a) it doesn't make sense to call the organizers "high-impact" and the responsive consumers "low-impact", if both of these groups are necessary for the protest to have impact at all,
(b) if we, as EAs, take the "organizer" role in our campaigns, we're expecting a bunch of people to take the "responsive consumer" role, even if they don't care as much about the issue as we do. So the cooperative thing to do would be to ourselves take the "responsive consumer" role in campaigns that others are organizing, even if we don't care as much about the issue as those organizers do.
--
I do, however, think that (b) only applies to cases where there is an organized protest. If there was a prominent group of anti-Nestle protesters who had specific demands of Nestle that had a reasonable chance of being adopted and that would lead to positive impact, and they were protesting because Nestle didn't do those, then maybe this argument would counsel that we should support them if it doesn't cost too much. But I don't really think this applies to the OP, who seemed to be suggesting that we should do a bunch of one-person "personal boycotts", which I don't think will have much impact.
That is some useful information. It seems like what you're saying is that these campaigns really involve three different groups:
(a) the "inner circle" of 10-100 activists that are organizing the campaign,
(b) some larger number of supporters that are waiting in the wings to execute the threatened protests if the original demands aren't met,
(c) the "audience" of the protests - i.e. this is the general public who will be driven away from the target in response to the protests.
And it's really only group (c) that needs to be big enough as a fraction of the target's total business that the target finds it worth listening to.
Are there any good sources that go into more detail about how these kind of campaigns work? (I'm interested in this in general, not just in relation to this specific post)
I'm a little confused by the claim that "personal choices" aren't effective, but corporate pressure campaigns are. Isn't the way a corporate pressure campaign works that you convince the target that they will be boycotted unless they make the changes you are demanding? So the corporate pressure campaign is only effective if you have people that are willing to change their personal choices. Or am I misunderstanding and that's not how corporate pressure campaigns work?
I think these sorts of critiques don’t just apply to EA - it seems to me like just about any intervention would fall into one of them.
AMF-style interventions that focus on specific problems, like malaria nets? As you discuss, these avoid problems 1 and 2 (because they’re doing a specific thing that wasn’t already being done, so they’re not taking away local jobs or displacing local capacity) but are vulnerable to problem 3 (because the specific thing they’re doing may not be what the locals want)
Maybe organizations could avoid problem 3 by setting up a system to get public input on their projects so they can avoid doing projects that locals don’t want? But expand this out, and at that point you’re basically running (part of) a government - after all, aggregating people’s preferences into decisions is essentially what governments do. (After all, “locals” aren’t a homogeneous group with uniform preferences.) And then you definitely run into all the usual problems with preference aggregation, and you certainly are trying to replace (part of) the local government’s role.
Maybe avoid that by working with the local government or local institutions, rather than setting up your own preference aggregation method? Well, if the problem is that the local government and local institutions are bad or corrupt, that’s certainly not a good idea.
Or maybe your intervention could be targeted directly at improving the institutions? In that case you certainly are saying that you know how to run institutions better than the locals, which goes back into the “we know better than you” dynamic. And I thought part of the problem with colonialism was replacing local institutions that were illegible but functional with institutions that looked better to the colonizers, but didn’t actually work well for locals.
Should you hire locals to work for you? Well in that case you’re displacing those locals away from whatever else they would be doing. Don’t hire locals and bring in your own people instead? Then you’re taking away jobs and ignoring local expertise.
It seems like if you wanted an intervention that avoided all of these kinds of potential problems, it would have to have the following properties:
But also:
And I’m having a hard time thinking of any intervention that would fit this bill; if the first two things were true, it seems that would imply that locals would do it or ask their governments to do it.
(Even GiveDirectly-style cash transfers could be argued to have the problem: one could argue that local governments should be giving their citizens cash, so that Acemoglu’s critique about “key services of the state being taken over by other entities” would apply here.)
Two other points of this style of critique that I’m confused about are:
I don't have any particular ideas for projects to start in this area, but if there are any projects that are already going on, I might be interested in supporting them. You can contact me to DM if/when you have anything to share!
I am following this issue and, like everyone else here, am also extremely concerned. I am very interested in what I can do right now to help. Are there useful places to donate right now? I am an ETGer who normally gives about $100-200k per year and I would be willing to donate that amount or more if there were a good opportunity.
About this footnote:
============================
Carol Adams even informs us that:
Maybe treading on the oppressed is a crucial part of Singer’s daily writing routine, without which he would never have written a word? If there’s some other reason to believe this wild causal claim, we’re never told what it is.
=============================
Here's a potential more charitable interpretation of this claim. Adams might not be claiming:
"Singer personally performs some act of oppression as part of his writing process."
Adam's causal model might be more of the following:
"Singer's ideas aren't unusually good; there are lots of other people, including people of color and those who identify as women, who have ideas that are as good or better. But those other people are being pushed down (by society in general, not by Singer personally) which leaves that position open for Singer. If people of color and those who identify as women weren't oppressed, then some of them would be able to outcompete Singer, leaving Singer to not flourish as much."