Thanks Silvan, this was a really nice comment and I appreciate you engaging! I do see (and sometimes acutely feel) some of the tension you're pointing at, around how to think about morality and how that relates to whether people are good people.
I think I have a coherent model for how to think about it, though it won't entirely resolve the cognitive dissonance. Rather than speaking to each of your questions, I think it might be most useful for me to lay out the model, and then you can decide if there are parts you'd like to probe on. Feel free to push me on your questions again if I've skipped something you wanted answered.
***
1. Everyone is born with inbuilt moral drives. We come into the world with various instincts and intuitions, and then the environment we're in moulds them. There's a big literature here: Moral Foundations Theory took a reasonable stab at describing a set of 5–6 of these drives, The Blank Slate makes the general case for us not being blank slates, The Moral Animal gives an intuitive sense of how these moral drives get shaped by our environment, books like The Selfish Gene describe how altruism emerges, etc.
2. Most people behave well by following their drives. If someone has (a) ~normal morality-inducing genes (nothing that particularly promotes aggression, nothing that leaves them with little empathy) and (b) grows up in a reasonable environment, they'll usually behave well by following where their drives lead them.
They'll still have some drives which often lead to bad behaviour (greed, lust), but those get balanced out by the pro-social drives, and the person tends to behave well within their community without needing to philosophise much about the nature of morality or what their principles are.
For example, they don't beat their dog because doing so would feel terrible, rather than because they have a principled view about how one ought to treat dogs. Their decision not to cheat on their spouse when tempted comes from an intuitive sense that it would be wrong, rather than from having independently thought much about the nature of cheating.
If you ask these folks why they didn't take the immoral action, they'll refer to some moral principle rather than the feeling. Now, they people might be acting due to some articulate-able principle rather than a feeling (and, as I describe in the next section, in addition to acting on drives everyone is also acting on principles to some degree). But it's absolutely possible to act on a feeling without any background principle. We can be confident in that because:
Other social mammals regulate their behaviour towards one another with drives like fairness / respect for authority / loyalty etc.
The research suggesting that in normal cases for people the principle comes after the behaviour (see Jonathan Haidt, and Josh Greene in his work on [dual process theory](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_process_theory_
We can observe inconsistencies in people's behaviour: sometimes they'll endorse act consistently with a principle and endorse that principle, but when the case is abstract enough that it doesn't trigger a moral drive/feeling they won't act on that principle
3. Sometimes people spend a lot of effort to follow principles about how to act. These principles might have felt compelling because of a surge of moral feeling at some point, but people act on them even in cases where they don't strongly feel the moral drive. This can look like going to church every Sunday, a child being told they shouldn't lie and then avoiding even white lies, or a newly converted Muslim deciding to pray 5 times a day. Or it can look like something which pushes someone to devote their whole life to pro-social work, even though the people around them don't. William Wilberforce, after his conversion, agonised over whether his faith required him to leave politics altogether; John Newton and Pitt talked him into staying, and he took up abolition. Or someone chooses a career path where they'll earn more money in order to give more of it away.
4. Effective altruists tend to have stronger moral drives, and make a higher effort to follow principles, than average. On drives I'd guess something like the 90th percentile on average for highly engaged EAs, with some people (Julia Wise comes to mind) well into the 99th. On following principles I'd guess the average is above the 90th percentile too, but it won't be above the 99.9th. Lots of people try very hard to follow principles!
***
Given that background, here's how I think about whether people are 'good people'.
Basically, there's a spectrum. Take the people I grew up among in Queensland, and rank them on some combination of how intensely they feel moral drives and how much effort they put into following principles. My intuitive sense is that anyone above roughly the 30th percentile is living a good life and being a good person. I think my parents are well above that line.
There's something remarkable about this definition, which is what follows from people being this level of good. I'm saying that ~80% of people are good people. And with the distribution where it is, points 1–5 in my post are all true.
Isn't it pretty good that we live in a world with lots of people like my parents in it? Yeah, it's nice. But goodness gracious, humanity is falling short. With the world's current approach to morality we get all 5 of those things. That's really bad, and I'd really like us to do better, and so I don't feel very satisfied with an account of morality which doesn't ask for much more than that.
There are two ways I can imagine us doing better.
The whole population moves up. Imagine everyone shifts up by one standard deviation on drives and principle-following. Some fun sums: if ~5–8% of people refuse to eat meat today, that shift takes it to ~25–35%. If a few percent of people give away 10% of their income, it takes that to 10–25%. I'd guess that more animal advocates at the top end, plus everyone knowing several everyday vegetarians, is enough to get us to fewer than half the population eating meat. (And if we moved down a standard deviation, the world would look a lot worse.)
More people make the move. The other way is about how OK it is to be a basically good person (say, 90th percentile) without really amping up how seriously you act on principles. I'd really like more people to move up towards the top top end of the spectrum. Someone like Wilberforce was acting well into the 99th percentile. I think many of my colleagues are. I think many of the doctors at Médecins Sans Frontières are, etc.
I feel this most strongly about people who are talented and broadly thoughtful, who want to make the world better, and who are provisioned enough to have a real degree of choice about what career they have, but who don't shift much of their time and attention towards helping others. There's a very adjacent version of those people who takes the 'following principles' side more seriously, and who as a result ends up well into the 99th percentile on that axis. I really do want those people to step up more than they currently are.
If 10–100x more of them moved up to the 99th percentile of moral seriousness, such that they're really trying to act on principles to make the world better (rather than being a consultant, or working at an AI startup, or working as a doctor in a high-income country as many of the 90th percentile 'good people' will be), then I think we'd have a substantially better chance of solving the 5 problems in my post and more, or at least of being in a much better place on them. Sometimes I feel the energy that Rutger Bregman has at the School for Moral Ambition. I understand him as saying something like: "Guys, what on earth are you doing being a consultant, or working at a startup, right now?"
So yeah, that's where I am. I think the world is full of good people, but at the same time I really want them to be better.
Is there something my parents / others are getting right that I'm missing? I haven't found anything compelling there. Like, I think that it's good for people to behave as well as my parents do, I think I behave at least as well as them within my community and towards the people around me: including staying late to look after patients when I was a doctor. It's just that, in addition, I'm more obsessed with the principles aspect, and I'm more willing to let those principles dictate my major life decisions, including my career choice and choosing to work unusually hard.
For what it's worth, my parents don't think I'm missing something that they understand. Their view of my work is that it's wonderful that I'm doing this extra-mile thing. They've done a lot to support me on it! They once came on a 2,000 km trip with 20 medical students, driving around the country giving talks on the moral imperative to give (a project called Run to Better Days), and their biggest charity is now the Against Malaria Foundation. They do worry about the effect the intensity has on my welfare, and if they had their way I'd be physically in Australia and close to them. But they understand it: and their main orientation to it is actually about being proud of me trying particularly hard to help others.
***
I should add: I don't feel very sure of the model above. It's the one I've mostly relied on for at least 8 years, but I don't remember seeing a writeup which puts it exactly like this, and there's a good chance there's a better way to think about it. In fact, a colleague messaged me after reading the post to say she has a "deep sense that you're wrong about how you think about people", and we've just set up a time to chat about it!
I do think that people are responsible for any experiences that they cause others to have, and that marketing does sometimes cause many many people a mildly negative experience in order to reach one person who is positively affected by the marketing. We might set that threshold for where that becomes a bad thing to do differently, but I expect most people would think of e.g. the spam pervading early email as net negative.
That said, you're right that that others experience ads differently from me, and I don't think that it'd be very useful to push salespeople to be feel more accountable for negative effects they have on others. I added the rant-y footnote on a last minute whim, and on reflection it was probably a bit silly to do so.
This gave the following picture for 2018–2019 (all figures in estimated DIPY per FTE and not robust):
Website (6.5)
Podcast (4.1) and advising (3.8)
Job board (2.9) and headhunting (2.5)
~~~
We did a scrappy internal update to our above 2020 analysis, but haven’t prioritised cleaning it up / coming to agreements internally and presenting it externally. (We think that cost effectiveness per FTE has reduced, as we say in the review, but are not sure how much.)
The basic reasoning for that is:
We’ve found that these analyses aren’t especially valuable for people who are making decisions about whether to invest their resources in 80k (most importantly - donors and staff (or potential staff)). These groups tend to either a) give these analyses little weight in their decision making, or b) prefer to engage with the source material directly and run their own analysis, so that they’re able to understand and trust the conclusions more.
The updates since 2020 don’t seem dramatic to me: we haven’t repeated the case studies/DIPY analysis, Open Phil hasn’t repeated their survey, the user survey figures didn’t update me substantially, and the results of the EA survey have seemed similar to previous years. (I’m bracketing out marketing here, which I do think seems significantly less cost effective per dollar, though not necessarily per FTE.)
Coming to figures that we’re happy to stand behind here takes a long time.
~~~
This appendix of the 2022 review might also be worth looking at - it shows FTEs and a sample of lead metrics for each programme.
Lumping 2021 and 2022 progress together into a single public report meant that we saved hundreds of hours of staff time.
A few other things that might be worth mentioning:
I’m not sure whether we’ll use 1 or 2 year cycles for public annual reviews in future.
This review (14 pages + appendices) was much less in-depth and so much less expensive to produce than 2020 (42 pages + appendices) or 2019 (109 pages + appendices). If we end up thinking that our public reviews should be more like this going forward then the annual approach would be much less costly.
In 2021, we only did a ‘mini-annual review’ internally, in which we attempted to keep the time cost of the review relatively low and not open up major strategic questions.
We didn’t fundraise in 2021.
I regret not publishing a blog post at the time stating this decision.
Hi Vaidehi - I'm answering here as I was responsible for 80k’s impact evaluation until late last year.
My understanding is that plan changes (previously IASPC's then DIPY's) were a core metric 80K used in previous years to evaluate impact. It seems that there has been a shift to a new metric - CBPC's (see below).
This understanding is a little off. Instead, it’s that in 2019 we decided to switch from IASPCs to DIPYs and CBPCs.
The best place to read about the transition is the mistakes page here, and I think the best places to read detail on how these metrics work is the 2019 review for DIPYs and the 2020 review for CBPCs. (There’s a 2015 blog post on IASPCs.)
~~~
Some more general comments on how I think about this:
A natural way to think about 80k’s impact is as a funnel which culminates in a single metric which we can relate to as a for profit does to revenue.
I haven’t been able to create a metric which is overall strong enough to make me want to rely on it like that.
The closest I’ve come is the DIPY, but it’s got major problems:
Lags by years.
Takes hundreds of hours to put together.
Requires a bunch of judgement calls - these are hard for people without context to assess and have fairly low inter-rater reliability (between people, but also the same people over time).
Most (not all) of them come from case studies where people are asked questions directly by 80,000 Hours staff. That introduces some sources of error, including from social-desirability bias.
The case studies it’s based on can’t be shared publicly.
So, rather than thinking in terms of a single metric to optimise, when I think about 80k’s impact and strategy I consider several sources of information and attempt to weigh each of them appropriately given their strengths and weaknesses.
The major ones are listed in the full 2022 annual review, which I’ll copy out here:
Our in-depth case study analyses, which produce our top plan changes (last analysed in 2020). EDIT: this process produces the DIPYs as well. I've made a note of this in the public annual review - apologies, doing this earlier might have prevented you getting the impression that we retired them.
Our own data about how users interact with our services (e.g. our historical metrics linked in the appendix).
Our and others' impressions of the quality of our visible output.
~~~
On your specific questions:
I understand that we didn’t make predictions about CBPCs in 2021.
Otherwise, I think the above is probably the best general answer to give to most of these - but lmk if you have follow ups :)
I don't think you'll find anything from us which is directly focused on most of these questions. (It's also not especially obvious that this is our comparative advantage within the community.)
But we do have some relevant public content. Much of it is in our annual review, including its appendices.
You also might find these results of the OP EA/LT survey interesting.
Hi - thanks for taking the time to think through these, write them out and share them! We really appreciate getting feedback from people who use our services and who have a sense of how others do.
I work on 80k’s internal systems, including our impact evaluation (which seems relevant to your ideas).
I've made sure that the four points will be seen by the relevant people at 80k for each of these.
Re. #1, I'm confused about whether you're more referring to 'message testing' (i.e. what ideas/framings make our ideas appealing to which audiences) or 'long term follow up with users to see how their careers/lives have change'. (I can imagine various combinations of these.)
Through overpopulation and excessive consumption, humanity is depleting its natural resources, polluting its habitat, and causing the extinction of other species. Continuing like this will lead to the collapse of civilisation and likely our own extinction.
This one seems very common to me, and sadly people often feel fatalistic about it.
Two things that feeling might come from:
People rarely talking about aspects of it which are on a positive trajectory (e.g. the population of whales, acid rain, CFC emissions, UN population projections).
The sense that there are so related things to solve - such that even if we managed to fix (say) climate change then we'd still see (say) our fisheries cause the collapse of the ocean's ecosystem.
Thanks Silvan, this was a really nice comment and I appreciate you engaging! I do see (and sometimes acutely feel) some of the tension you're pointing at, around how to think about morality and how that relates to whether people are good people.
I think I have a coherent model for how to think about it, though it won't entirely resolve the cognitive dissonance. Rather than speaking to each of your questions, I think it might be most useful for me to lay out the model, and then you can decide if there are parts you'd like to probe on. Feel free to push me on your questions again if I've skipped something you wanted answered.
***
1. Everyone is born with inbuilt moral drives. We come into the world with various instincts and intuitions, and then the environment we're in moulds them. There's a big literature here: Moral Foundations Theory took a reasonable stab at describing a set of 5–6 of these drives, The Blank Slate makes the general case for us not being blank slates, The Moral Animal gives an intuitive sense of how these moral drives get shaped by our environment, books like The Selfish Gene describe how altruism emerges, etc.
2. Most people behave well by following their drives. If someone has (a) ~normal morality-inducing genes (nothing that particularly promotes aggression, nothing that leaves them with little empathy) and (b) grows up in a reasonable environment, they'll usually behave well by following where their drives lead them.
They'll still have some drives which often lead to bad behaviour (greed, lust), but those get balanced out by the pro-social drives, and the person tends to behave well within their community without needing to philosophise much about the nature of morality or what their principles are.
For example, they don't beat their dog because doing so would feel terrible, rather than because they have a principled view about how one ought to treat dogs. Their decision not to cheat on their spouse when tempted comes from an intuitive sense that it would be wrong, rather than from having independently thought much about the nature of cheating.
If you ask these folks why they didn't take the immoral action, they'll refer to some moral principle rather than the feeling. Now, they people might be acting due to some articulate-able principle rather than a feeling (and, as I describe in the next section, in addition to acting on drives everyone is also acting on principles to some degree). But it's absolutely possible to act on a feeling without any background principle. We can be confident in that because:
3. Sometimes people spend a lot of effort to follow principles about how to act. These principles might have felt compelling because of a surge of moral feeling at some point, but people act on them even in cases where they don't strongly feel the moral drive. This can look like going to church every Sunday, a child being told they shouldn't lie and then avoiding even white lies, or a newly converted Muslim deciding to pray 5 times a day. Or it can look like something which pushes someone to devote their whole life to pro-social work, even though the people around them don't. William Wilberforce, after his conversion, agonised over whether his faith required him to leave politics altogether; John Newton and Pitt talked him into staying, and he took up abolition. Or someone chooses a career path where they'll earn more money in order to give more of it away.
4. Effective altruists tend to have stronger moral drives, and make a higher effort to follow principles, than average. On drives I'd guess something like the 90th percentile on average for highly engaged EAs, with some people (Julia Wise comes to mind) well into the 99th. On following principles I'd guess the average is above the 90th percentile too, but it won't be above the 99.9th. Lots of people try very hard to follow principles!
***
Given that background, here's how I think about whether people are 'good people'.
Basically, there's a spectrum. Take the people I grew up among in Queensland, and rank them on some combination of how intensely they feel moral drives and how much effort they put into following principles. My intuitive sense is that anyone above roughly the 30th percentile is living a good life and being a good person. I think my parents are well above that line.
There's something remarkable about this definition, which is what follows from people being this level of good. I'm saying that ~80% of people are good people. And with the distribution where it is, points 1–5 in my post are all true.
Isn't it pretty good that we live in a world with lots of people like my parents in it? Yeah, it's nice. But goodness gracious, humanity is falling short. With the world's current approach to morality we get all 5 of those things. That's really bad, and I'd really like us to do better, and so I don't feel very satisfied with an account of morality which doesn't ask for much more than that.
There are two ways I can imagine us doing better.
The whole population moves up. Imagine everyone shifts up by one standard deviation on drives and principle-following. Some fun sums: if ~5–8% of people refuse to eat meat today, that shift takes it to ~25–35%. If a few percent of people give away 10% of their income, it takes that to 10–25%. I'd guess that more animal advocates at the top end, plus everyone knowing several everyday vegetarians, is enough to get us to fewer than half the population eating meat. (And if we moved down a standard deviation, the world would look a lot worse.)
More people make the move. The other way is about how OK it is to be a basically good person (say, 90th percentile) without really amping up how seriously you act on principles. I'd really like more people to move up towards the top top end of the spectrum. Someone like Wilberforce was acting well into the 99th percentile. I think many of my colleagues are. I think many of the doctors at Médecins Sans Frontières are, etc.
I feel this most strongly about people who are talented and broadly thoughtful, who want to make the world better, and who are provisioned enough to have a real degree of choice about what career they have, but who don't shift much of their time and attention towards helping others. There's a very adjacent version of those people who takes the 'following principles' side more seriously, and who as a result ends up well into the 99th percentile on that axis. I really do want those people to step up more than they currently are.
If 10–100x more of them moved up to the 99th percentile of moral seriousness, such that they're really trying to act on principles to make the world better (rather than being a consultant, or working at an AI startup, or working as a doctor in a high-income country as many of the 90th percentile 'good people' will be), then I think we'd have a substantially better chance of solving the 5 problems in my post and more, or at least of being in a much better place on them. Sometimes I feel the energy that Rutger Bregman has at the School for Moral Ambition. I understand him as saying something like: "Guys, what on earth are you doing being a consultant, or working at a startup, right now?"
So yeah, that's where I am. I think the world is full of good people, but at the same time I really want them to be better.
Is there something my parents / others are getting right that I'm missing? I haven't found anything compelling there. Like, I think that it's good for people to behave as well as my parents do, I think I behave at least as well as them within my community and towards the people around me: including staying late to look after patients when I was a doctor. It's just that, in addition, I'm more obsessed with the principles aspect, and I'm more willing to let those principles dictate my major life decisions, including my career choice and choosing to work unusually hard.
For what it's worth, my parents don't think I'm missing something that they understand. Their view of my work is that it's wonderful that I'm doing this extra-mile thing. They've done a lot to support me on it! They once came on a 2,000 km trip with 20 medical students, driving around the country giving talks on the moral imperative to give (a project called Run to Better Days), and their biggest charity is now the Against Malaria Foundation. They do worry about the effect the intensity has on my welfare, and if they had their way I'd be physically in Australia and close to them. But they understand it: and their main orientation to it is actually about being proud of me trying particularly hard to help others.
***
I should add: I don't feel very sure of the model above. It's the one I've mostly relied on for at least 8 years, but I don't remember seeing a writeup which puts it exactly like this, and there's a good chance there's a better way to think about it. In fact, a colleague messaged me after reading the post to say she has a "deep sense that you're wrong about how you think about people", and we've just set up a time to chat about it!
Thanks Siobhan!
I do think that people are responsible for any experiences that they cause others to have, and that marketing does sometimes cause many many people a mildly negative experience in order to reach one person who is positively affected by the marketing. We might set that threshold for where that becomes a bad thing to do differently, but I expect most people would think of e.g. the spam pervading early email as net negative.
That said, you're right that that others experience ads differently from me, and I don't think that it'd be very useful to push salespeople to be feel more accountable for negative effects they have on others. I added the rant-y footnote on a last minute whim, and on reflection it was probably a bit silly to do so.
Thanks for the thought!
You might be interested in the analysis we did in 2020. To pull out the phrase that I think most closely captures what you’re after:
~~~
We did a scrappy internal update to our above 2020 analysis, but haven’t prioritised cleaning it up / coming to agreements internally and presenting it externally. (We think that cost effectiveness per FTE has reduced, as we say in the review, but are not sure how much.)
The basic reasoning for that is:
~~~
This appendix of the 2022 review might also be worth looking at - it shows FTEs and a sample of lead metrics for each programme.
Cody's answer below and mine above give better 'overall' answers to your question, but - if you'd like to see something concrete and incomplete you could look at this appendix of job board placements we're aware of.
Basically: these just take a really long time!
Lumping 2021 and 2022 progress together into a single public report meant that we saved hundreds of hours of staff time.
A few other things that might be worth mentioning:
Hi Vaidehi - I'm answering here as I was responsible for 80k’s impact evaluation until late last year.
This understanding is a little off. Instead, it’s that in 2019 we decided to switch from IASPCs to DIPYs and CBPCs.
The best place to read about the transition is the mistakes page here, and I think the best places to read detail on how these metrics work is the 2019 review for DIPYs and the 2020 review for CBPCs. (There’s a 2015 blog post on IASPCs.)
~~~
Some more general comments on how I think about this:
A natural way to think about 80k’s impact is as a funnel which culminates in a single metric which we can relate to as a for profit does to revenue.
I haven’t been able to create a metric which is overall strong enough to make me want to rely on it like that.
The closest I’ve come is the DIPY, but it’s got major problems:
(There’s a bit more discussion on impact eval complexities in the 2019 annual review.)
So, rather than thinking in terms of a single metric to optimise, when I think about 80k’s impact and strategy I consider several sources of information and attempt to weigh each of them appropriately given their strengths and weaknesses.
The major ones are listed in the full 2022 annual review, which I’ll copy out here:
~~~
On your specific questions:
Ah nice, understood!
I don't think you'll find anything from us which is directly focused on most of these questions. (It's also not especially obvious that this is our comparative advantage within the community.)
But we do have some relevant public content. Much of it is in our annual review, including its appendices.
You also might find these results of the OP EA/LT survey interesting.
Hi - thanks for taking the time to think through these, write them out and share them! We really appreciate getting feedback from people who use our services and who have a sense of how others do.
I work on 80k’s internal systems, including our impact evaluation (which seems relevant to your ideas).
I've made sure that the four points will be seen by the relevant people at 80k for each of these.
Re. #1, I'm confused about whether you're more referring to 'message testing' (i.e. what ideas/framings make our ideas appealing to which audiences) or 'long term follow up with users to see how their careers/lives have change'. (I can imagine various combinations of these.)
Could you elaborate?
I was interested in seeing a breakdown of the endpoints, before they'd been compressed into the scales AAC uses above.
Jamie kindly pulled this spreadsheet together for me, which I'm sharing (with permission), as I thought it might be helpful to other readers too.
This one seems very common to me, and sadly people often feel fatalistic about it.
Two things that feeling might come from: