Denise_Melchin's Quick takes

One positive secondary effect of this is that Great but uncontroversial posts will be seen by lots of people. Currently posts which are good but don't generate any disagreement get a few upvotes then fall off the front page pretty quickly because nobody has much to say.

I think specific/precise positive feedback is almost as good (and in some cases better) as specific criticism, especially if you (implicitly) point to features that other posts don't have. This allows onlookers to learn and improve in addition to giving a positive signal to the author. For a close reference class, the LessWrong team often has comments explaining why they like a certain post.

The type of social/"fluffy" content that some readers may be worried about is if lots of our threads have non-substantive comments like this one, especially if they're bloated and/or repeated often. I don't have a strong sense of where our balance should be on this.

IMO the best type of positive comment adds something new on top of the original post, by extending it or by providing new and relevant information. This is more difficult than generic praise, but I don't think it's particularly harder than criticism.

Fairly strongly agreed - I think it's much easier to express disagreement than agreement on the margin, and that on the margin people find it too intimidating to post to the EA Forum and it would be better to be perceived as friendlier. (I have a somewhat adjacent blog post about going out of your way to be a nicer person)

I strongly feel this way for specific positive feedback, since I think that's often more neglected and can be as useful as negative feedback (at least, useful to the person making the post). I feel less strongly for "I really enjoyed this post"-esque comments, though I think more of those on the margin would be good.

An alternate approach would be to PM people the positive feedback - I think this adds a comparable amount to the person, but removes the "changing people's perceptions of how scary posting on the EA Forum is" part

I wrote a quick post in response to this comment (though I've also been thinking about this issue for a while).

I think people should just share their reactions to things most of the time, unless there's a good reason not to, without worrying about how substantive their reactions are. If praise tends to be silent and criticism tends to be loud, I worry that authors will end up with a very skewed view of how people perceive their work. (And that's even before considering that criticism tends to occupy more space in our minds than praise.)

I agree, positive feedback can be a great motivator.

Very quick comment: I think I feel this intuition, but when I step back, I'm not sure why potential to contribute via donations should reduce more slowly with 'ability' than potential to contribute in other ways. 

If anything, income seems to be unusually heavy-tailed compared to direct work (the top two donors in EA account for the majority of the capital, but I don't think the top 2 direct workers account for the majority of the value of the labour).

I wonder if people who can't do the top direct work jobs wouldn't be able to have more impact by working in government, spreading ideas / community building / generally being sensible advocates for EA ideas, taking supporting roles at non-profits, and maybe other things.

Would be curious for more thoughts on how this works.

I generally agree with most of what you said, including the 3%. I'm mostly writing for that target audience, which I think is probably at least a partial mistake, and seems worth improving.

I'm also thinking that there seem to be quite a few exceptions. E.g., the Zurich ballot initiative I was involved in had contributors from a very broad range of backgrounds. I've also seen people from less privileged backgrounds make excellent contributions in operations-related roles, in fundraising, or by welcoming newcomers to the community. I'm sure I'm missing many further examples. I think these paths are harder to find than priority paths, but they exist, and often seem pretty impactful to me.

I'm overall unsure how much to emphasize donations. It does seem the most robust option for the greatest number of people. But if direct work is often even more impactful, perhaps it's still worth emphasizing that more; it often seems more impactful to have 10 extra people do direct work than 100 people donate 10%. Of course, ideally we'd find a way to speak to all of them.

I find myself pretty confused about how to think about this. Numerically, I feel like the level we're advising is at most top 3%, and probably more like top 1%ish?  

Some considerations that are hard for me to think through:

• The current allocation and advice given by career EAs is very strongly geared towards very specific empirical views of a) the target audience of who we actually talk to/advise, b) what the situation/needs of the world looks like (including things like funding vs talent overhangs), and c) what we currently know about and are comfortable talking about. So for example right now the advice is best suited for the top X%, maybe even top 0.Y%, of ability/credentials/financial stability/etc. This may or may not change in 10-20 years.
  • And when we give very general career advice like "whether you should expect to have more of an impact through donations or direct work", it's hard to say something definitive without forecasts 10-20 years out.
• The general point here is that many of our conclusions/memes are phrased like logical statements  (eg claims about the distributions of outcomes being power-law or w/e), but they're really very specific empirical claims based on the situation as of 2014-2021
• Are you (and others) including initiative when you think about ability? This is related to smarts (in terms of seeing opportunities) and work ethic (in terms of pulling through on seizing opportunities when they happen), but it feels ultimately somewhat distinct.
  • When I think about EA-aligned ex-coworkers at Google, I'd guess ~all of them are in the top 3% for general ability (and will be in a higher percentile if you use a more favorable metric like programming ability or earning potential). But I'd still guess most of them wouldn't end up doing direct work, for reasons including but not limited to starting new projects etc being kind of annoying.
    • Like I think many of them can do decent work if EA had a good centralized job allocation system and they are allocated to exactly the best direct work fit for them, and a decent subset of them would  actually sacrifice their comfortable BigTech work for something with a clear path to impact, but in practice <<50% of them would actually end up doing direct work that's more useful than donations in the current EA allocation.
• The current composition of the EA community is incredibly weird, even by rich-country standards, so most of us have a poor sense of how useful our thoughts are to others
  • As a sanity check/Fermi, ~60k (~0.2%) of college-aged Americans attend Ivy League undergrad,  you get ~2x from people attending similar tiered universities (MIT/Stanford/UChicago etc), and ~2-3x from people of similar academic ability who attended non-elite universities, plus a small smattering of people who didn't go to university or dropped out, etc.
  • This totals to ~1% of the general population, and yet is close to the average of the EA composition (?).
  • My guess is that most EAs don't have a strong sense of what the 97th percentile of ability in the population looks like, never mind the 90th.

Reasons why I think the cutoff might in practice be higher:

• Because EA is drawn from a fairly tail-end of several distributions, we might overestimate population averages?
• As you've noted, the cutoff for specific professions we recommend seems much higher than top 3% for that profession. For an example of something a bit outside the current zeitgeist, I  think a typical Ivy League English major would not be very competitive for journalism roles (and naively I'd guess journalism to be much more of a comparative advantage for Ivy League English majors than most other roles)
  • Obviously you can be top X% in general and top 0.Y% in specific professions, but I'm not sure there are enough "specific professions" out there where people can have a large enough impact to outweigh earning to give.
  • (Note that I'm not saying that you need to have attended a elite college to do good work. Eg Chris Olah didn't do college, Eliezer Yudkowsky didn't finish high school. But I think when we these sorts of claims, we're saying some people are overlooked/not captured by the existing credentialing systems, and their general ability is on par or higher than the people who are captured by such systems, and ~1% of total population of Ivy League-equivalents is roughly where my Fermi lands)
• I feel like quite a few talented people well within the top 3% or even top 1% in terms of assessed general ability fail to do impactful direct work (either within or outside of the EA community), so the base rates aren't looking super hot?

Reasons why I think the cutoff might in practice be lower:

• I guess in every "elite" community I'm tangentially a part of or heard of, there's just a very strong incentive to see yourself as much more elite than you actually are, based on insufficient evidence or even evidence to the contrary.
  • So I guess in general we should have a moderate prior that we're BSing ourselves when we think of ourselves (whether EA overall or direct work specifically) as especially elite.
• Our advice just isn't very optimized for a population of something like "otherwise normal people with a heroic desire to do good." I can imagine lots and lots of opportunities in practice for people who aren't stellar at eg climbing bureaucracies or academic talent, but willing to dedicate their lives to doing good.

On balance I think there are stronger factors pushing the practical cutoff to be higher rather than lower than top 3%, but I'm pretty unsure about this. 

Hm, I agree that the most impactful careers are competitive, but the different careers themselves seem to require very different aptitudes and abilities so I'm not sure the same small group would be at the top of each of these career trajectories.

For example when Holden* talks about options like becoming a politician, doing conceptual research, being an entrepreneur, or skillfully managing the day-to-day workings of an office I just don't see the same people succeeding in all of those paths.

In my view the majority of people currently involved in EA could develop a skillset that's quite useful for direct work.

*https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bud2ssJLQ33pSemKH/my-current-impressions-on-career-choice-for-longtermists

My impression is that at best the top 3% of people in rich countries in terms of ability (intelligence, work ethic, educational credentials) are able to pursue such high impact options. What I have a less good sense of is whether other people agree with this number.

This seems "right", but really, I don't truly know.

One reason I'm uncertain because I don't know the paths you are envisioning for these people.

Do you have a sense of what paths are available to the 3%, maybe writing out very briefly, say 2 paths that they could reliably succeed in, e.g. we would be comfortable advising them today to work on?

For more context, what I mean is, building on this point:

high impact job options like becoming a grantmaker directing millions of dollars or meaningfully influencing developing world health policy will not be realistic paths.

So while I agree that the top 3% of people have access to these options, my sense is that influencing policy and being top grant makers have this "central planner"-like aspect. We would probably only want a small group of people involved for multiple reasons. I would expect the general class of such roles and even their "support" to be a tiny fraction of the population.

So it seems getting a sense of the roles (or even some much broader process in some ideal world where 3% of people get involved) is useful to answer your question.

I have some sympathy with this view, and think you could say a similar thing with regard non-utilitarian views. But I'm not sure how one would cache out the limits on 'atrocious' views in a principled manner. To a truly committed longtermist it is plausible that any non-longtermist view is atrocious!

I mostly share this sentiment. One concern I have: I think one must be very careful in developing cause prioritization tools that work with almost any value system. Optimizing for naively held moral views can cause net harm; Scott Alexander implied that terrorists might just be taking beliefs too seriously when those beliefs only work in an environment of epistemic learned helplessness.

One possible way to identify views reasonable enough to develop tools for is checking that they're consistent under some amount of reflection; another way could be checking that they're consistent with facts e.g. lack of evidence for supernatural entities, or the best knowledge on conscious experience of animals.

I think that thinking about longtermism enables people to feel empowered to solve problems somewhat beyond the reality, truly feeling the prestige/privilege/knowing-better of 'doing the most good'- also, this may be a viewpoint applicable for those who really do not have to worry about finances, but also that is relative. Which also links to my second point that some affluent persons enjoy speaking about innovative solutions, reflecting current power structures defined by high-technology, among others. It would be otherwise hard to make a community of people feeling the prestige of being paid a little to do good or donating to marginally improve some of the current global institutions, that cause the present problems. Or wouldit

A similar analogy with the fossil fuel industry is mentioned by Stuart Russell (crediting Danny Hillis) here:

let’s say the fossil fuel industry as if it were an AI system. I think this is an interesting line of thought, because what he’s saying basically and — other people have said similar things — is that you should think of a corporation as if it’s an algorithm and it’s maximizing a poorly designed objective, which you might say is some discounted stream of quarterly profits or whatever. And it really is doing it in a way that’s oblivious to lots of other concerns of the human race. And it has outwitted the rest of the human race.

It also seems that  "things go really badly if you optimise straightforwardly for one goal" bears similarities to criticisms of central planning or utopianism in general though.

People do bring this up a fair bit - see for example some previous related discussion on Slatestarcodex here and the EA forum here.

I think most AI alignment people would be relatively satisfied with an outcome where our controls over AI outcomes were as strong as our current control over corporations: optimisation for a criteria that requires continual human input from a broad range of people, while keeping humans in-the-loop of decision making inside the optimisation process, and with the ability to impose additional external constrains at run-time (regulations).

I mused about something similar here - about corporations as dangerous optimization demons which will cause GCRs if left unchecked :

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vy2QCTXfWhdiaGWTu/corporate-global-catastrophic-risks-c-gcrs-1

Not sure how fruitful it was.

For capitalism more generally, GPI also has "Alternatives to GDP" in their research agenda, presumably because the GDP measure is what the whole world is pretty much optimizing for, and creating a new measure might be really high value.