The curve is not measuring things in value but rather intuitive pull according to this data--simplicity trade-off! 

Sorry if it wasn't clear -- this is literally just the moral case intuition, and the numbers are just meant to reflect another moral intuition that your curve can either align with or not. 

Some concrete decision would be based on how one weights simplicity mathematically vs fitting data, etc. I wanted to stay agnostic about it in this post.

I think I disagree with this last point in that -- it looks like threshold deontology is doing something like I am (in that it is giving two principles instead of one to fit more data), but it is often not cashing it out this way which makes it hard to figure out where you should start being more conseqentialist. One interpretation of what this proposal does is it makes it more explicit (given assumptions), so you know exactly where you're going to jump from deontic constraints to consequences. 

Like I said in the post, I think that this graph definitely doesn't reflect all the complexities of normative theory building -- it was a mere metaphor/ very toy example. I do think that even if you think the graphic metaphor is merely that (a metaphor), you can still take my proposal conceptually seriously (as in, accept that there's some trade-off here, and plausibly case intuitions can outweigh general principles. 

The title says Bidan's NSA; I assume it is meant to say Biden's* 

Great post. 

Adding on one of the points mentioned: I think that if you are driven to make AI go well because of EA, you’d probably like to do this in a very specific way (ie big picture: astronomical waste, x risks are way worse than catastrophic risks, avoiding s risks; smaller picture: what to prioritize in AIS, ect). This, I think, means that you want people (or at least the most impactful people) in the field to be ea/ea-adj (because what are the odds the values of an explicitly moral normie and EA will be perfectly correlated on the actionable things that really matter?). 

Another related point is that a bunch of people might join AIS for clout/(future) power (perhaps not even consciously; finding out your real motivations are hard until there are big stakes!) and having been an EA for a bunch of time (and having shown flexibility about cause prio) before AIS is a good signal that you’re not (not a perfect one but some substantial evidence imo) 

This is gold. Best joke post I’ve seen on the forum in a while. 

It depends on the case, but there are definitely cases where I would. 

Also, while you make a good point that these can sometimes converge, I think the priority of concerns is extremely different under shortermism vs longtermism, which i see as the important part of "most important determinant of what we ought to do." (Setting aside mugging and risk aversion/robustness) some very small or even directional shift could make something hold the vast majority of your moral weight, as opposed to before where the impact might have not been that big/ impact would have been outweighed by lack of neglectedness or tractability. 

P.S. If one (including myself) failed to do x, given that it would shift priorities but wouldn't affect what one would do in light of short term damage, I think that would say less about one's actual beliefs and more about their intuitions of disgust towards means-end-reasoning - but this is just a hunch and somewhat based on my own introspection (to be fair, sometimes this comes from moral uncertainty/reputational concerns that should be used in this reasoning and is to your point).

Yep, agreed. Good point 

Good post!
One possible complication I didn’t see addressed is the role of cause saturation.

Suppose that the most effective global health charities (or interventions more generally) are likely to become saturated over time as EA grows, more money flows in, and people “get their act together.” If that saturation happens on, say, a 5-year timeline, then delaying donations means missing the chance to fund the top-marginal opportunities now. Even if you plan to donate to the “next best” charity later, there’s a real cost: the best opportunities would have had 5 extra years of impact that are now lost.

In other words, for waiting to be better, the investment return advantage must outweigh not just the growth in baseline incomes, but also the lost value of funding the most cost-effective opportunities before they close. 

Im not sure how likely this sorta thing is in practice, but i thought it was worth a note. 

Far-future effects are the most important determinant of what we ought to do

I agree with a bunch of the skepticism in the comments made, but (to me) it seems like there are not enough people on the strong longtermist side. 

A couple points responding to some of the comments: 

1. You should have some non trivial probability in the times of perils hypothesis/lock in (perhaps in large part because AI might be a big deal) -- the idea that we're living in a time where the chances of existential risk are particularly high but if we get past it the rate of x risk will go down indefinitely (or at least for a very long while). This is plausible because increasing uncertainty as time goes furthes, as thorstad points out, makes x risk rate regress to mean, and the mean is quite plausibly low. If this is true, you don't need to make so many claims about the far future in order to have massive amount of impact on it.
2. A lot of people refer to pascal's mugging or fanaticism here, which I don't usually think is correct. (Unless we reject pascal's mugging for ambuity aversion reasons, which i am uncertain about but probably don't) the probabilities that people usually put on longtermism are not near the kind of bets we shouldn't take if we're anti being fanatical because we take these similarly low probabilities all the time -- for instance, having fire extinguishers, wearing seatbelts, maybe most clinical trials. Unless you have significantly lower probability than that, invoking pascal's mugging feels a bit overly pessimistic about our ability to affect things like this. Also (and this is a cheeky move), if you just have some non-mugging-level probability in that claim being correct, you probably still get far future being most important without a mugging. 

On the other hand, a one point against that I don't think was brought up: 

1. In the XPT, the Superforecaster median prediction was that there will only exist 500 billion humans (not near as many as, say, the bostrom or newberry numbers, which may make the cost + tractability concerns potentially such that it's not as important in expectation as, say, affecting very large amounts of shrimp or insects now (to be fair, the 95th percentile superforecaster was at 100 trillion, so maybe the uncertainty becomes fairly assymetrical quickly, though). 

Thank you for the post - and holy shit that’s a lot of outreach. 

I appreciate the appropriate hedging, but I would be even more hedged. 
1) it’s unclear how much of this stuff generalizes. For some universities, general meetings are amazing, and for others, they’re boring. I think it’s pretty difficult to make generalized claims about this from a sample size of universities of about 1 (especially when there’s counter evidence - for instance, the amazing organizers at Yale EA just got 70 intro fellowship apps from just doing TONS of outreach. That’s a large number and is possibly the equivalent update in the opposite direction). 
2) (controversial and speculative take incoming) maybe scaling past some numver of people (depending on university) is just very difficult at below top 30 universities (or that each university has some number like this, but if this is true, it feels like a higher cap would be correlated with prestige). In your case, perhaps there is some amount of potential EAs, you have good initial selection effects, and you just captured most people from that. 

Would be happy to get pushback on all of this, though.