A serious effective altruism movement with clean house. Everyone who pushed the ‘work with AI capabilities company’ line should retire or be forced to retire. There is no need to blame anyone for mistakes, the decision makers had reasons. But they chose wrong and should not continue to be leaders.
Do you think that whenever anyone makes a decision that ends up being bad ex-post they should be forced to retire?
Doesn’t this strongly disincentivize making positive EV bets which are likely to fail?
Edit: I interpreted this comment as a generic claim about how the EA community should relate to things which went poorly ex-post, I now think this comment was intended to be less generic.
Not OP, but I take the claim to be “endorsing getting into bed with companies on-track to make billions of dollars profiting from risking the extinction of humanity in order to nudge them a bit, is in retrospect an obviously doomed strategy, and yet many self-identified effective altruists trusted their leadership to have secret good reasons for doing so and followed them in supporting the companies (e.g. working there for years including in capabilities roles and also helping advertise the company jobs). now that a new consensus is forming that it indeed was obviously a bad strategy, it is also time to have evaluated the leadership’s decision as bad at the time of making the decision and impose costs on them accordingly, including loss of respect and power”.
So no, not disincentivizing making positive EV bets, but updating about the quality of decision-making that has happened in the past.
So no, not disincentivizing making positive EV bets, but updating about the quality of decision-making that has happened in the past.
I think there’s a decent case that such updating will indeed disincentivize making positive EV bets (in some cases, at least).
In principle we’d want to update on the quality of all past decision-making. That would include both [made an explicit bet by taking some action] and [made an implicit bet through inaction]. With such an approach, decision-makers could be punished/rewarded with the symmetry required to avoid undesirable incentives (mostly). Even here it’s hard, since there’d always need to be a [gain more influence] mechanism to balance the possibility of losing your influence.
In practice, most of the implicit bets made through inaction go unnoticed—even where they’re high-stakes (arguably especially when they’re high-stakes: most counterfactual value lies in the actions that won’t get done by someone else; you won’t be punished for being late to the party when the party never happens). That leaves the explicit bets. To look like a good decision-maker the incentive is then to make low-variance explicit positive EV bets, and rely on the fact that most of the high-variance, high-EV opportunities you’re not taking will go unnoticed.
From my by-no-means-fully-informed perspective, the failure mode at OpenPhil in recent years seems not to be [too many explicit bets that don’t turn out well], but rather [too many failures to make unclear bets, so that most EV is left on the table]. I don’t see support for hits-based research. I don’t see serious attempts to shape the incentive landscape to encourage sufficient exploration. It’s not clear that things are structurally set up so anyone at OP has time to do such things well (my impression is that they don’t have time, and that thinking about such things is no-one’s job (?? am I wrong ??)).
It’s not obvious to me whether the OpenAI grant was a bad idea ex-ante. (though probably not something I’d have done)
However, I think that another incentive towards middle-of-the-road, risk-averse grant-making is the last thing OP needs.
That said, I suppose much of the downside might be mitigated by making a distinction between [you wasted a lot of money in ways you can’t legibly justify] and [you funded a process with (clear, ex-ante) high negative impact]. If anyone’s proposing punishing the latter, I’d want it made very clear that this doesn’t imply punishing the former. I expect that the best policies do involve wasting a bunch of money in ways that can’t be legibly justified on the individual-funding-decision level.
I interpreted the comment as being more general than this. (As in, if someone does something that works out very badly, they should be forced to resign.)
Upon rereading the comment, it reads as less generic than my original interpretation. I’m not sure if I just misread the comment or if it was edited. (Would be nice to see the original version if actually edited.)
(Edit: Also, you shouldn’t interpret my comment as an endorsement or agreement with the the rest of the content of Ben’s comment.)
endorsing getting into bed with companies on-track to make billions of dollars profiting from risking the extinction of humanity in order to nudge them a bit
By “positive EV bets” I meant positive EV with respect to shared values, not with respect to personal gain.
Edit: Maybe your view is that leaders should take this bets anyway even though they know they are likely to result in a forced retirement. (E.g. ignoring the disincentive.) I was actually thinking of the disincentive effect as: you are actually a good leader, so you remaining in power would be good, therefore you should avoid actions that result in you losing power for unjustified reasons. Therefore you should avoid making positive EV bets (as making these bets is now overall negative EV as it will result in a forced leadership transition which is bad). More minimally, you strongly select for leaders which don’t make such bets.
“ETA” commonly is short for “estimated time of arrival”. I understand you are using it to mean “edited” but I don’t quite know what it is short for, and also it seems like using this is just confusing for people in general.
A serious effective altruism movement with clean house. Everyone who pushed the ‘work with AI capabilities company’ line should retire or be forced to retire. There is no need to blame anyone for mistakes, the decision makers had reasons. But they chose wrong and should not continue to be leaders.
Do you think that whenever anyone makes a decision that ends up being bad ex-post they should be forced to retire?
Doesn’t this strongly disincentivize making positive EV bets which are likely to fail?
Edit: I interpreted this comment as a generic claim about how the EA community should relate to things which went poorly ex-post, I now think this comment was intended to be less generic.
Not OP, but I take the claim to be “endorsing getting into bed with companies on-track to make billions of dollars profiting from risking the extinction of humanity in order to nudge them a bit, is in retrospect an obviously doomed strategy, and yet many self-identified effective altruists trusted their leadership to have secret good reasons for doing so and followed them in supporting the companies (e.g. working there for years including in capabilities roles and also helping advertise the company jobs). now that a new consensus is forming that it indeed was obviously a bad strategy, it is also time to have evaluated the leadership’s decision as bad at the time of making the decision and impose costs on them accordingly, including loss of respect and power”.
So no, not disincentivizing making positive EV bets, but updating about the quality of decision-making that has happened in the past.
I think there’s a decent case that such updating will indeed disincentivize making positive EV bets (in some cases, at least).
In principle we’d want to update on the quality of all past decision-making. That would include both [made an explicit bet by taking some action] and [made an implicit bet through inaction]. With such an approach, decision-makers could be punished/rewarded with the symmetry required to avoid undesirable incentives (mostly).
Even here it’s hard, since there’d always need to be a [gain more influence] mechanism to balance the possibility of losing your influence.
In practice, most of the implicit bets made through inaction go unnoticed—even where they’re high-stakes (arguably especially when they’re high-stakes: most counterfactual value lies in the actions that won’t get done by someone else; you won’t be punished for being late to the party when the party never happens).
That leaves the explicit bets. To look like a good decision-maker the incentive is then to make low-variance explicit positive EV bets, and rely on the fact that most of the high-variance, high-EV opportunities you’re not taking will go unnoticed.
From my by-no-means-fully-informed perspective, the failure mode at OpenPhil in recent years seems not to be [too many explicit bets that don’t turn out well], but rather [too many failures to make unclear bets, so that most EV is left on the table]. I don’t see support for hits-based research. I don’t see serious attempts to shape the incentive landscape to encourage sufficient exploration. It’s not clear that things are structurally set up so anyone at OP has time to do such things well (my impression is that they don’t have time, and that thinking about such things is no-one’s job (?? am I wrong ??)).
It’s not obvious to me whether the OpenAI grant was a bad idea ex-ante. (though probably not something I’d have done)
However, I think that another incentive towards middle-of-the-road, risk-averse grant-making is the last thing OP needs.
That said, I suppose much of the downside might be mitigated by making a distinction between [you wasted a lot of money in ways you can’t legibly justify] and [you funded a process with (clear, ex-ante) high negative impact].
If anyone’s proposing punishing the latter, I’d want it made very clear that this doesn’t imply punishing the former. I expect that the best policies do involve wasting a bunch of money in ways that can’t be legibly justified on the individual-funding-decision level.
I interpreted the comment as being more general than this. (As in, if someone does something that works out very badly, they should be forced to resign.)
Upon rereading the comment, it reads as less generic than my original interpretation. I’m not sure if I just misread the comment or if it was edited. (Would be nice to see the original version if actually edited.)
(Edit: Also, you shouldn’t interpret my comment as an endorsement or agreement with the the rest of the content of Ben’s comment.)
Wasn’t edited, based on my memory.
Wasn’t OpenAI a nonprofit at the time?
Leadership is supposed to be about service not personal gain.
I don’t see how this is relevant to my comment.
By “positive EV bets” I meant positive EV with respect to shared values, not with respect to personal gain.
Edit: Maybe your view is that leaders should take this bets anyway even though they know they are likely to result in a forced retirement. (E.g. ignoring the disincentive.) I was actually thinking of the disincentive effect as: you are actually a good leader, so you remaining in power would be good, therefore you should avoid actions that result in you losing power for unjustified reasons. Therefore you should avoid making positive EV bets (as making these bets is now overall negative EV as it will result in a forced leadership transition which is bad). More minimally, you strongly select for leaders which don’t make such bets.
“ETA” commonly is short for “estimated time of arrival”. I understand you are using it to mean “edited” but I don’t quite know what it is short for, and also it seems like using this is just confusing for people in general.
ETA = edit time addition
I should probably not use this term, I think I picked up this habit from some other people on LW.
Oh, weird. I always thought “ETA” means “Edited To Add”.
I didn’t know it meant either.
The Internet seems to agree with you. I wonder why I remember “edit time addition”.