In Continued Defense Of Effective Altruism — Scott Alexander

EDIT: Scott has admitted a mistake, which addresses some of my criticism:



(this comment has overlapping points with titotal's)

I've seen a lot of people strongly praising this article on Twitter and in the comments here but I find some of the arguments weak. Insofar as the goal of the post is to say that EA has done some really good things, I think the post is right. But I don't think it convincingly argues that EA has been net positive for the world.^[1]

First: based on surveys, it seems likely that most (not all!) highly-engaged/leader EAs believe GCRs/longtermist causes are the most important, with a plurality thinking AI x-risk / x-risk more general are the more important.^[2] I will analyze the post from a ~GCR/longtermist-oriented worldview that thinks AI is the most important cause area during the rest of this comment; again I don't mean to suggest that everyone has it, but if something like it is held by the plurality of highly-engaged/leader EAs it seems highly relevant for the post to be convincing from that perspective.

My overall gripe is exemplified by this paragraph (emphasis mine):

And I think the screwups are comparatively minor. Allying with a crypto billionaire who turned out to be a scammer. Being part of a board who fired a CEO, then backpedaled after he threatened to destroy the company. These are bad, but I’m not sure they cancel out the effect of saving one life, let alone 200,000.

(Somebody’s going to accuse me of downplaying the FTX disaster here. I agree FTX was genuinely bad, and I feel awful for the people who lost money. But I think this proves my point: in a year of nonstop commentary about how effective altruism sucked and never accomplished anything and should be judged entirely on the FTX scandal, nobody ever accused those people of downplaying the 200,000 lives saved. The discourse sure does have its priorities.)

I'm concerned about the bolded part; I'm including the caveat for context. I don't want to imply that saving 200,000 lives isn't a really big deal, but I will discuss from the perspective of "cold hard math" .

1. 200,000 lives equals roughly a ~.0025% reduction in extinction risk, or a ~.25% reduction in risk of a GCR killing 80M people, if we care literally zero about future people. To the extent we weight future people, the numbers obviously get much lower.
2. The magnitude of the effect size of the board firing Sam, of which the sign is currently unclear IMO, seems arguably higher than .0025% extinction risk and likely higher than 200,000 lives if you weight the expected value of all future people >~100x of that of current people.
3. The FTX disaster is a bit more ambiguous because some of the effects are more indirect; quickly searching for economic costs didn't find good numbers, but I think a potentially more important thing is that it is likely to some extent an indicator of systemic issues in EA that might be quite hard to fix.
4. The claim that "I’m not sure they cancel out the effect of saving one life" seems silly to me, even if we just look at generally large "value of a life" estimates compared to the economic costs of the FTX scandal.

Now I'll discuss the AI section in particular. There is little attempt to compare the effect sizes of "accomplishments" (with each other and also with potential negatives, with just a brief allusion to EAs accelerating AGI) or argue that they are net positive. The effect sizes seem quite hard to rank to me, but I'll focus on some ones that seem important but potentially net negative (not claiming that they definitely are!), in order of their listing:

1. "Developed RLHF, a technique for controlling AI output widely considered the key breakthrough behind ChatGPT."
   1. This is needless to say controversial in the AI safety community
2. Got two seats on the board of OpenAI, held majority control of OpenAI for one wild weekend, and still apparently might have some seats on the board of OpenAI, somehow?
   1. As I said above the sign of this still seems unclear, and I'm confused why it's included when later Scott seems to consider it a negative
3. Helped found, and continue to have majority control of, competing AI startup Anthropic, a $30 billion company widely considered the only group with technology comparable to OpenAI’s.
   1. Again, controversial in the AI safety community

1. ^{^}

   My take is that EA has more likely than not been positive, but I don't think it's that clear and either way, I don't think this post makes a solid argument for it.

2. ^{^}

   As of 2019, EA Leaders thought that over 2x (54% vs. 24%) more resources should go to long-term causes than short-term with AI getting the most (31% of resources), and the most highly-engaged EAs felt somewhat similarly. I'd guess that the AI figure has increased substantially given rapid progress since 2019/2020 (2020 was the year GPT-3 was released!). We have a 2023 survey of only CEA staff in which 23/30 people believe AI x-risk should be a top priority (though only 13/30 say "biggest issue facing humanity right now", vs. 6 for animal welfare and 7 for GHW). CEA staff could be selected for thinking AI is less important than those directly working on it, but would think it's more important than those at explicitly non-longtermist orgs.

Pablo - thanks for sharing the link to this excellent essay.

Apart from being a great intro to EA for people made semi-skeptical by the FTX and OpenAI situations, Scott Alexander's writing style is also worthy of broader emulation among EAs. It's light, crisp, clear, funny, fact-based -- it's everything that EA writing for the public should be.

Here's a long excerpt (happy to take it down if asked, but I think people might be more likely to go read the whole thing if they see part of it): 

The only thing everyone agrees on is that the only two things EAs ever did were “endorse SBF” and “bungle the recent OpenAI corporate coup.”

In other words, there’s never been a better time to become an effective altruist! Get in now, while it’s still unpopular! The times when everyone fawns over us are boring and undignified. It’s only when you’re fighting off the entire world that you feel truly alive.

And I do think the movement is worth fighting for. Here’s a short, very incomplete list of things effective altruism has accomplished in its ~10 years of existence. I’m counting it as an EA accomplishment if EA either provided the funding or did the work, further explanations in the footnotes. I’m also slightly conflating EA, rationalism, and AI doomerism rather than doing the hard work of teasing them apart:

Global Health And Development

• Saved about 200,000 lives total, mostly from malaria¹
• Treated 25 million cases of chronic parasite infection.²
• Given 5 million people access to clean drinking water.³
• Supported clinical trials for both the RTS.S malaria vaccine (currently approved!) and the R21/Matrix malaria vaccine (on track for approval)⁴
• Supported additional research into vaccines for syphilis, malaria, helminths, and hepatitis C and E.⁵
• Supported teams giving development economics advice in Ethiopia, India, Rwanda, and around the world.⁶

Animal Welfare:

• Convinced farms to switch 400 million chickens from caged to cage-free.⁷
• 
• Freed 500,000 pigs from tiny crates where they weren’t able to move around⁸
• Gotten 3,000 companies including Pepsi, Kelloggs, CVS, and Whole Foods to commit to selling low-cruelty meat.

AI:

• Developed RLHF, a technique for controlling AI output widely considered the key breakthrough behind ChatGPT.⁹
• …and other major AI safety advances, including RLAIF and the foundations of AI interpretability¹⁰.
• Founded the field of AI safety, and incubated it from nothing up to the point where Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Demis Hassabis, Sam Altman, Bill Gates, and hundreds of others have endorsed it and urged policymakers to take it seriously.¹¹
• Helped convince OpenAI to dedicate 20% of company resources to a team working on aligning future superintelligences.
• Gotten major AI companies including OpenAI to work with ARC Evals and evaluate their models for dangerous behavior before releasing them.
• Got two seats on the board of OpenAI, held majority control of OpenAI for one wild weekend, and still apparently might have some seats on the board of OpenAI, somehow?¹²
• [Skipped screenshot]
• Helped found, and continue to have majority control of, competing AI startup Anthropic, a $30 billion company widely considered the only group with technology comparable to OpenAI’s.¹³
• [Skipped screenshot]
• Become so influential in AI-related legislation that Politico accuses effective altruists of having “[taken] over Washington” and “largely dominating the UK’s efforts to regulate advanced AI”.
• Helped (probably, I have no secret knowledge) the Biden administration pass what they called "the strongest set of actions any government in the world has ever taken on AI safety, security, and trust.”
• Helped the British government create its Frontier AI Taskforce.
• Won the PR war: a recent poll shows that 70% of US voters believe that mitigating extinction risk from AI should be a “global priority”.

Other:

• Helped organize the SecureDNA consortium, which helps DNA synthesis companies figure out what their customers are requesting and avoid accidentally selling bioweapons to terrorists¹⁴.
• Provided a significant fraction of all funding for DC groups trying to lower the risk of nuclear war.¹⁵
• Donated a few hundred kidneys.¹⁶
• Sparked a renaissance in forecasting, including major roles in creating, funding, and/or staffing Metaculus, Manifold Markets, and the Forecasting Research Institute.
• Donated tens of millions of dollars to pandemic preparedness causes years before COVID, and positively influenced some countries’ COVID policies.
• Played a big part in creating the YIMBY movement - I’m as surprised by this one as you are, but see footnote for evidence¹⁷.

I think other people are probably thinking of this as par for the course - all of these seem like the sort of thing a big movement should be able to do. But I remember when EA was three philosophers and few weird Bay Area nerds with a blog. It clawed its way up into the kind of movement that could do these sorts of things by having all the virtues it claims to have: dedication, rationality, and (I think) genuine desire to make the world a better place.

II.

Still not impressed? Recently, in the US alone, effective altruists have:

• ended all gun violence, including mass shootings and police shootings
• cured AIDS and melanoma
• prevented a 9-11 scale terrorist attack

Okay. Fine. EA hasn’t, technically, done any of these things.

But it has saved the same number of lives that doing all those things would have.

About 20,000 Americans die yearly of gun violence, 8,000 of melanoma, 13,000 from AIDS, and 3,000 people in 9/11. So doing all of these things would save 44,000 lives per year. That matches the ~50,000 lives that effective altruist charities save yearly¹⁸.

People aren’t acting like EA has ended gun violence and cured AIDS and so on. all those things. Probably this is because those are exciting popular causes in the news, and saving people in developing countries isn’t. Most people care so little about saving lives in developing countries that effective altruists can save 200,000 of them and people will just not notice. “Oh, all your movement ever does is cause corporate boardroom drama, and maybe other things I’m forgetting right now.”

In a world where people thought saving 200,000 lives mattered as much as whether you caused boardroom drama, we wouldn’t need effective altruism. These skewed priorities are the exact problem that effective altruism exists to solve - or the exact inefficiency that effective altruism exists to exploit, if you prefer that framing.

Caude.ai summary for those in a hurry:

The article argues in defense of the effective altruism movement, citing its accomplishments in areas like global health, animal welfare, and AI safety, while contending criticisms of it are overblown. It makes the case that effective altruism's commitment to evidence-based altruism that focuses on the most tractable interventions to help others is a positive development worth supporting, despite some mistakes. The article concludes the movement has had significant positive impact that outweighs the negatives.

I'll read the article itself later, so be warned that I don't know how good this summary is.

Update: The summary is correct but significantly less viscerally motivating than the original. I love it!