[derektank]

>My critique of the EA community is that it’s myopic and unregularized. If you really think AGI is make-or-break for civilization, it’s completely rational to deprioritize side bets.

I’d be curious to hear you expand on this. What binds the EA community together, from the shrimp welfare enthusiasts and wild animal initiative, to the longtermist lightcone obsessive, to the people funding vitamin A supplementation, is simply a commitment to maximizing the number of quality adjusted life years saved each year and a belief that empirical observation can be used to improve that number.

To my mind, this is a valuable insight on its own. Yes, if you come to such a heuristic with absurd prior beliefs, such as whether 100k neurons alone have QALYs in the first place or by placing equal value on people actually alive today and hypothetical people in the far flung future, you will get absurd results. Garbage in, garbage out. But that’s not an indictment of the fundamental insight, especially when you consider how poorly allocated the roughly $2 trillion in global charitable spending is.

[mekael]

As a society we already know how to make the lives of everyone better:

1. Stable housing

2. Access to safe drinking water

3. Access to food

4. Access to healthcare

5. Access to education

6. Stable governments

The EA community has so many "ideas" about what would help, when all they need to do is focus on those six and the world would be as close to a utopia as you or I could hope to see in our lifetimes.

I legitimately thought you were kidding about the shrimp welfare initiative, but after looking it up I was more infuriated about EA than I normally am when it comes up. I can think of several causes which would be better served with 3 million USD, and all of them take care of human beings. Living, breathing, intelligent human beings. These people should not be in any position of power or taken seriously ever.

[derektank]

There are tradeoffs to make between those six items. Money spent on stable housing is money not spent on safe drinking water is money not spent on education. There is a limited amount of money spent on charitable giving every year, and we obviously cannot afford to provide all of those things to everyone with the funds currently available. If you’re arguing that people should simply be donating more money, I (and I think every EA) is right there with you. But given the world exists as it is, I would rather see money that’s currently being donated diverted from Catholic missionary schools and good governance NGOs to GiveWell’s top charities because I’m very confident that it would mean fewer dead kids.

[gcr]

I agree with your last sentence, but we can’t partition the budget up so cleanly though. Societal spending is interdependent and additive across domains. Spending on cheap access to safe water or food reduces healthcare costs. Spending heavily on education tends to strengthen government in the long run, and better-run governments amplify efforts to improve housing/food/water/.

The one exception is AI. Historically, redirecting charitable funds towards AI safety tends to starve or undo the rest of these efforts, which is why I’m so disappointed by many EA institutions dropping other initiatives to put their eggs in the AGI basket.