I feel that [SI] ought to be able to get more impressive endorsements than it has.
SI seems to have passed up opportunities to test itself and its own rationality by e.g. aiming for objectively impressive accomplishments.
Holden, do you believe that charitable organizations should set out deliberately to impress donors and high-status potential endorsers? I would have thought that a donor like you would try to ignore the results of any attempts at that and to concentrate instead on how much the organization has actually improved the world because to do otherwise is to incentivize organizations whose real goal is to accumulate status and money for their own sake.
For example, Eliezer’s attempts to teach rationality or “technical epistemology” or whatever you want to call it through online writings seem to me to have actually improved the world in a non-negligible way and seem to have been designed to do that rather than designed merely to impress.
ADDED. The above is probably not as clear as it should be, so let me say it in different words: I suspect it is a good idea for donors to ignore certain forms of evidence (“impressiveness”, affiliation with high-status folk) of a charity’s effectiveness to discourage charities from gaming donors in ways that seems to me already too common, and I was a little surprised to see that you do not seem to ignore those forms of evidence.
In other words, I tend to think that people who make philanthropy their career and who have accumulated various impressive markers of their potential to improve the world are likely to continue to accumulate impressive markers, but are less likely to improve the world than people who have already actually improved the world.
And of the three core staff members of SI I have gotten to know, 2 (Eliezer and another one who probably does not want to be named) have already improved the world in non-negligible ways and the third spends less time accumulating credentials and impressiveness markers than almost anyone I know.
I don’t think Holden was looking for endorsements from “donors and high-status potential endorsers”. I interpreted his post as looking for endorsements from experts on AI. The former would be evidence that SI could go on to raise money and impress people, and the latter would be evidence that SI’s mission is theoretically sound. (The strength of that evidence is debatable, of course.) Given that, looking for endorsements from AI experts seems like it would be A) a good idea and B) consistent with the rest of GiveWell’s methodology.
Although I would have thought that Holden is smart enough to decide whether the FAI project is theoretically sound without his relying on AI experts, maybe I am underestimating the difficulties of people like Holden who are smarter than I am, but who didn’t devote their college years to mastering computer science like I did.
I saw a related issue in a blog about a woman who lost the use of her arm due to an incorrectly treated infection. She initially complained that the judge in her disability case didn’t even look at the arm, but then was pleasantly surprised to have the ruling turn out in favor anyway.
I realized: of course the judge wouldn’t look at her arm. Having done disability cases before, the judge should know that gruesome appearance correlates weakly, if at all, with legitimate disability, but the emotional response is likely to throw off evaluation of things like an actual doctor’s report on the subject. Holden, similarly, is willing to admit that there are things about AI he personally doesn’t know, but that professionals who have studied the field for decades do know, and is further willing to trust those professionals to be minimally competent.
I have enough experience of legal and adminstrative disability hearings to say that each side always has medical experts on its side unless one side is unwilling or unable to pay for the testimony of at least one medical expert.
In almost all sufficiently important decisions, there are experts on both sides of the issue. And pointing out that one side has more experts or more impressive experts carries vastly less weight with me than, e.g., Eliezer’s old “Knowability of FAI” article at http://sl4.org/wiki/KnowabilityOfFAI
Holden, do you believe that charitable organizations should set out deliberately to impress donors and high-status potential endorsers?
The obvious answer would be “Yes.” Givewell only funneled about $5M last year, as compared to the $300,000M or so that Americans give on an annual basis. Most money still comes from people that base their decision on something other than efficiency, so targeting these people makes sense.
The question was not if an individual charity, holding constant the behavior of other charities, benefits from “setting out deliberately to impress donors and high-status potential endorsers”, but whether it is in Holden’s interests (in making charities more effective) to generally encourage charities to do so.
I think that making charities more effective is an instrumental goal, not a terminal goal. With a terminal goal of “more good stuff gets done”, it would indeed be in Holden’s interest to encourage charities to impress large donors or influential endorsers. In fact, Holden does that for the charities, an activity that appears to have a higher marginal impact than the actual activities of the charities per hour spent.
You have argued that charities can get more donations by focusing on being more impressive, but you seem to be assuming that a charity focusing on being more impressive, with more money, will do more good than a charity focused on doing good, with less money. And that assumption is what rhollerith was questioning.
GiveWell, I think, could be understood as an organization that seeks to narrow the gap for a charity between “seem more impressive to donors” and “show more convincing empirical evidence of effectiveness.” That is, they want other donors to be more impressed by better (i.e. more accurate) signals of effectiveness and less by worse (i.e. less accurate) signals.
If GiveWell succeeds in this there are two effects:
1) More donor dollars go to charities that demonstrate themselves to be effective.
2) Charities themselves become more effective, for two major reasons.
A) Not all charities rigorously self-evaluate at the moment; the incentive provided by a quorum of empirically-minded donors would help change that.
B) Moreover, good donor criticism of charity effectiveness reports can alert a charity to methodological blind-spots in its own work. A negative review from GiveWell can help a charity not merely change its communications for the better (more effective in donor dollars obtained), but also change its actual activities for the better (more effective in goals achieved).
As I understand it, SIAI insiders agree only with Holden’s critiques of SIAI’s attempts to demonstrate its effectiveness to outside donors, and not with his estimates of SIAI’s actual effectiveness (if they concurred in the latter, they’d quit SIAI now!). That said, I think SIAI should be open to the possibility that a donor-critic may have the potential to improve SIAI’s actual effectiveness as well. SIAI’s being forced to demonstrate its effectiveness to outsiders may lead to more constructive criticism and thus to more effective work. This constructive criticism could happen internally, if SIAI members preparing a report for knowledgeable outsiders like Holden are thereby forced to think like an outsider and thus see problems to which they had previously been blinded. It could also happen externally, if the knowledgeable outsider responds critically to the work presented.
What I’m saying (and the distinction is subtle) is that on the margin, the best thing the most impressive charities can do is increase their impressiveness. Something that Holden is doing for them, but even so he can only do so much.
What you say might be true if the only way to do good was to get money from donors. But of course that is not true: a do-gooder can become a donor himself or if he is too poor to donate, he can devote his energies to becoming richer so that he can donate time or money in the future (which is in fact the course that most of the young people inspired by SI’s mission are taking).
I am more comfortable speaking about individual altruists rather than charitable organizations. If an individual altruist can find a charity to employ him or find a patron to support his charitable work, then great! If not, then since money is an important resource, he should probably figure out how to get a supply of it. My point in this thread is that if the individual altruist is contemplating spending more than, oh, say 10% or 20% of his life force in becoming more impressive so that he can get a good job at a charity or can get more money from donors, then his plan is probably faulty and that he should instead plan to exchange goods and services he creates for money until money is no longer the constraining resource for his charitable goals.
(For individual altruists who live in countries where it is not as easy to exchange goods and services for money as it is in the English-speaking countries and who cannot emigrate to an English-speaking country, my figure of 10% to 20% might have to be adjusted upward.)
Individuals who make up SI are IMO already investing enough of their time and energy on impressing potential charitable employers, donors and endorsers, hence my request to Holden to clarify what he means when he says, “I feel that [SI] ought to be able to get more impressive endorsements than it has,” and, “SI seems to have passed up opportunities to test itself and its own rationality by e.g. aiming for objectively impressive accomplishments.”
Many more people would choose to have a paid position with SI than can be given a paid position with SI. What these people who wanted jobs at SI but did not get them usually do is earn as much money as possible with the goal of donating it to the cause. Many of these people are almost as qualified as the people who got jobs at SI. (Although they do not pay much, these are attractive jobs, e.g., because of the quality of the people one gets to spend one’s workday with.) It would tend to have a demoralizing effect on those that did not get jobs at SI for the people who did get jobs at SI to spend a significant fraction of their resources consolidating their access to high-status contacts, endorsements, charitable jobs and donor money.
So, not all effort at impressing others is bad, but there is need for a balance.
It would tend to have a demoralizing effect on those that did not get jobs at SI for the people who did get jobs at SI to spend a significant fraction of their resources consolidating their access to high-status contacts, endorsements, charitable jobs and donor money.
I agree with the above observation, but I don’t see how this is an argument supporting your 10-20% limit on investment in seeming impressive. Do you project overall funding would decrease as a result of the legitimate early-donor let-down you describe, or is it more that you expect actual enthusiasm for the cause to wane as the ‘charity overhead’ factor worsens?
When I put on my donor hat, that is, when I imagine my becoming a significant donor, I tend in my imaginings and my plans to avoid anything that interferes with deriving warm fuzzies from the process of donating or planning to donate—because when we say “warm fuzzies” we are referring to (a kind of) pleasure, and pleasure is the “gasoline” of the mind: it is certainly not the only thing that can “power” or “motivate” mental work, but it is IMHO the best fuel for work that needs to be sustained over a span of years. (And, yes, that is probably an argument against “Purchasing Fuzzies and Utilons Separately” in some situations although I did not have time today to re-read that article to see whether it can be reconciled with this comment.)
And, yeah, seeing money I donate (or simply imagining the money I will donate in the future) go to improving the lives of people who are probably not much better than me, but who spent a big fraction of their time and energy competing for status within the singularitarian community, jobs and donations with the likes of me, is one of the things that would probably interfere with my deriving warm fuzzies from the whole years-long and hopefully decades-long long process of my becoming a significant donor.
Certainly I am not alone in this aspect of my psychology. Now I will grant that a philanthropist can get a lot of donations by ignoring people who react like I do (namely, react with resentment) to high levels of prestige-seeking and impression management. But I tend to believe that to a philanthropist, donors are like customers are to a consultancy or investors are to a fast-growing company: the quality of the thinking of one’s donors (and in particular whether those donors got into donating out of a subconscious desire to affiliate with high-status folk) will tend to have a large effect on one’s sanity and ability to reach one’s goals.
And let me stress again that at present the level of prestige-seeking and impression management by insiders at SI is low enough not to cause my resentment to build up to levels that would cause me to start thinking about directing my donations elsewhere. But that might change if enough people with Holden-Karnofsky levels of credibility and influence exhort SI to increase their levels of prestige-seeking and impression management.
ADDED. The thing that is wrong with this comment and probably some of my other comments in this thread is that some of my remarks seem to be addressed to people seeking donations. If I were a better communicator, I would have made it clear that the target audience for my comments is donors. I am not worried about persuading people seeking donations because I am confident that if there were some barrier to my donating to, e.g., SI and FHI, I will manage to find other ways of purchasing utilons of comparable or almost-comparable efficiency.
One last thing I would say to donors and wanna-be donors is that this tendency towards resentment I have been describing in this comment (and the resulting inhibitory effect on my motivation) can be considered a feature (rather than a bug) of my personal psychology. In particular, it can be viewed as a form of pre-commitment to penalize (by withholding something I would otherwise be tempted to supply) certain behaviors which not only cause people like me to be overlooked and outcompeted for attractive jobs in charities, but also make the charitable world function less efficiently than it other would through a dynamic similar to a tragedy of the commons.
And this tendency I detect in myself really does feel like a precommitment in the sense that (as is true of almost all human precommitments that operate through the emotions) I have no recollection or impression of having chosen it and in the sense that it would probably require the expenditure of a very great deal of mental resources on my part to act contrary to it.
Your explanation is more or less what I’d gathered from your earlier statement. It makes sense.
The org. that can convince passionate supporters of the cause to work for $ and donate may be different from the one that can get the most mainstream donations.
This conversation suggests a good habit to practice: being open about how and why I feel about something real, or would about something hypothetical. Since it’s hard to separate internal openness from public openness, even though it’s really the internal practice I want, maybe airing real motivations/desires more often (as you just did) is better than my conservative semi-stoic default.
Holden, do you believe that charitable organizations should set out deliberately to impress donors and high-status potential endorsers? I would have thought that a donor like you would try to ignore the results of any attempts at that and to concentrate instead on how much the organization has actually improved the world because to do otherwise is to incentivize organizations whose real goal is to accumulate status and money for their own sake.
For example, Eliezer’s attempts to teach rationality or “technical epistemology” or whatever you want to call it through online writings seem to me to have actually improved the world in a non-negligible way and seem to have been designed to do that rather than designed merely to impress.
ADDED. The above is probably not as clear as it should be, so let me say it in different words: I suspect it is a good idea for donors to ignore certain forms of evidence (“impressiveness”, affiliation with high-status folk) of a charity’s effectiveness to discourage charities from gaming donors in ways that seems to me already too common, and I was a little surprised to see that you do not seem to ignore those forms of evidence.
In other words, I tend to think that people who make philanthropy their career and who have accumulated various impressive markers of their potential to improve the world are likely to continue to accumulate impressive markers, but are less likely to improve the world than people who have already actually improved the world.
And of the three core staff members of SI I have gotten to know, 2 (Eliezer and another one who probably does not want to be named) have already improved the world in non-negligible ways and the third spends less time accumulating credentials and impressiveness markers than almost anyone I know.
I don’t think Holden was looking for endorsements from “donors and high-status potential endorsers”. I interpreted his post as looking for endorsements from experts on AI. The former would be evidence that SI could go on to raise money and impress people, and the latter would be evidence that SI’s mission is theoretically sound. (The strength of that evidence is debatable, of course.) Given that, looking for endorsements from AI experts seems like it would be A) a good idea and B) consistent with the rest of GiveWell’s methodology.
Although I would have thought that Holden is smart enough to decide whether the FAI project is theoretically sound without his relying on AI experts, maybe I am underestimating the difficulties of people like Holden who are smarter than I am, but who didn’t devote their college years to mastering computer science like I did.
I saw a related issue in a blog about a woman who lost the use of her arm due to an incorrectly treated infection. She initially complained that the judge in her disability case didn’t even look at the arm, but then was pleasantly surprised to have the ruling turn out in favor anyway.
I realized: of course the judge wouldn’t look at her arm. Having done disability cases before, the judge should know that gruesome appearance correlates weakly, if at all, with legitimate disability, but the emotional response is likely to throw off evaluation of things like an actual doctor’s report on the subject. Holden, similarly, is willing to admit that there are things about AI he personally doesn’t know, but that professionals who have studied the field for decades do know, and is further willing to trust those professionals to be minimally competent.
I have enough experience of legal and adminstrative disability hearings to say that each side always has medical experts on its side unless one side is unwilling or unable to pay for the testimony of at least one medical expert.
In almost all sufficiently important decisions, there are experts on both sides of the issue. And pointing out that one side has more experts or more impressive experts carries vastly less weight with me than, e.g., Eliezer’s old “Knowability of FAI” article at http://sl4.org/wiki/KnowabilityOfFAI
The obvious answer would be “Yes.” Givewell only funneled about $5M last year, as compared to the $300,000M or so that Americans give on an annual basis. Most money still comes from people that base their decision on something other than efficiency, so targeting these people makes sense.
The question was not if an individual charity, holding constant the behavior of other charities, benefits from “setting out deliberately to impress donors and high-status potential endorsers”, but whether it is in Holden’s interests (in making charities more effective) to generally encourage charities to do so.
I think that making charities more effective is an instrumental goal, not a terminal goal. With a terminal goal of “more good stuff gets done”, it would indeed be in Holden’s interest to encourage charities to impress large donors or influential endorsers. In fact, Holden does that for the charities, an activity that appears to have a higher marginal impact than the actual activities of the charities per hour spent.
You have argued that charities can get more donations by focusing on being more impressive, but you seem to be assuming that a charity focusing on being more impressive, with more money, will do more good than a charity focused on doing good, with less money. And that assumption is what rhollerith was questioning.
GiveWell, I think, could be understood as an organization that seeks to narrow the gap for a charity between “seem more impressive to donors” and “show more convincing empirical evidence of effectiveness.” That is, they want other donors to be more impressed by better (i.e. more accurate) signals of effectiveness and less by worse (i.e. less accurate) signals.
If GiveWell succeeds in this there are two effects:
1) More donor dollars go to charities that demonstrate themselves to be effective.
2) Charities themselves become more effective, for two major reasons. A) Not all charities rigorously self-evaluate at the moment; the incentive provided by a quorum of empirically-minded donors would help change that. B) Moreover, good donor criticism of charity effectiveness reports can alert a charity to methodological blind-spots in its own work. A negative review from GiveWell can help a charity not merely change its communications for the better (more effective in donor dollars obtained), but also change its actual activities for the better (more effective in goals achieved).
As I understand it, SIAI insiders agree only with Holden’s critiques of SIAI’s attempts to demonstrate its effectiveness to outside donors, and not with his estimates of SIAI’s actual effectiveness (if they concurred in the latter, they’d quit SIAI now!). That said, I think SIAI should be open to the possibility that a donor-critic may have the potential to improve SIAI’s actual effectiveness as well. SIAI’s being forced to demonstrate its effectiveness to outsiders may lead to more constructive criticism and thus to more effective work. This constructive criticism could happen internally, if SIAI members preparing a report for knowledgeable outsiders like Holden are thereby forced to think like an outsider and thus see problems to which they had previously been blinded. It could also happen externally, if the knowledgeable outsider responds critically to the work presented.
What I’m saying (and the distinction is subtle) is that on the margin, the best thing the most impressive charities can do is increase their impressiveness. Something that Holden is doing for them, but even so he can only do so much.
What you say might be true if the only way to do good was to get money from donors. But of course that is not true: a do-gooder can become a donor himself or if he is too poor to donate, he can devote his energies to becoming richer so that he can donate time or money in the future (which is in fact the course that most of the young people inspired by SI’s mission are taking).
I am more comfortable speaking about individual altruists rather than charitable organizations. If an individual altruist can find a charity to employ him or find a patron to support his charitable work, then great! If not, then since money is an important resource, he should probably figure out how to get a supply of it. My point in this thread is that if the individual altruist is contemplating spending more than, oh, say 10% or 20% of his life force in becoming more impressive so that he can get a good job at a charity or can get more money from donors, then his plan is probably faulty and that he should instead plan to exchange goods and services he creates for money until money is no longer the constraining resource for his charitable goals.
(For individual altruists who live in countries where it is not as easy to exchange goods and services for money as it is in the English-speaking countries and who cannot emigrate to an English-speaking country, my figure of 10% to 20% might have to be adjusted upward.)
Individuals who make up SI are IMO already investing enough of their time and energy on impressing potential charitable employers, donors and endorsers, hence my request to Holden to clarify what he means when he says, “I feel that [SI] ought to be able to get more impressive endorsements than it has,” and, “SI seems to have passed up opportunities to test itself and its own rationality by e.g. aiming for objectively impressive accomplishments.”
Many more people would choose to have a paid position with SI than can be given a paid position with SI. What these people who wanted jobs at SI but did not get them usually do is earn as much money as possible with the goal of donating it to the cause. Many of these people are almost as qualified as the people who got jobs at SI. (Although they do not pay much, these are attractive jobs, e.g., because of the quality of the people one gets to spend one’s workday with.) It would tend to have a demoralizing effect on those that did not get jobs at SI for the people who did get jobs at SI to spend a significant fraction of their resources consolidating their access to high-status contacts, endorsements, charitable jobs and donor money.
So, not all effort at impressing others is bad, but there is need for a balance.
I agree with the above observation, but I don’t see how this is an argument supporting your 10-20% limit on investment in seeming impressive. Do you project overall funding would decrease as a result of the legitimate early-donor let-down you describe, or is it more that you expect actual enthusiasm for the cause to wane as the ‘charity overhead’ factor worsens?
When I put on my donor hat, that is, when I imagine my becoming a significant donor, I tend in my imaginings and my plans to avoid anything that interferes with deriving warm fuzzies from the process of donating or planning to donate—because when we say “warm fuzzies” we are referring to (a kind of) pleasure, and pleasure is the “gasoline” of the mind: it is certainly not the only thing that can “power” or “motivate” mental work, but it is IMHO the best fuel for work that needs to be sustained over a span of years. (And, yes, that is probably an argument against “Purchasing Fuzzies and Utilons Separately” in some situations although I did not have time today to re-read that article to see whether it can be reconciled with this comment.)
And, yeah, seeing money I donate (or simply imagining the money I will donate in the future) go to improving the lives of people who are probably not much better than me, but who spent a big fraction of their time and energy competing for status within the singularitarian community, jobs and donations with the likes of me, is one of the things that would probably interfere with my deriving warm fuzzies from the whole years-long and hopefully decades-long long process of my becoming a significant donor.
Certainly I am not alone in this aspect of my psychology. Now I will grant that a philanthropist can get a lot of donations by ignoring people who react like I do (namely, react with resentment) to high levels of prestige-seeking and impression management. But I tend to believe that to a philanthropist, donors are like customers are to a consultancy or investors are to a fast-growing company: the quality of the thinking of one’s donors (and in particular whether those donors got into donating out of a subconscious desire to affiliate with high-status folk) will tend to have a large effect on one’s sanity and ability to reach one’s goals.
And let me stress again that at present the level of prestige-seeking and impression management by insiders at SI is low enough not to cause my resentment to build up to levels that would cause me to start thinking about directing my donations elsewhere. But that might change if enough people with Holden-Karnofsky levels of credibility and influence exhort SI to increase their levels of prestige-seeking and impression management.
ADDED. The thing that is wrong with this comment and probably some of my other comments in this thread is that some of my remarks seem to be addressed to people seeking donations. If I were a better communicator, I would have made it clear that the target audience for my comments is donors. I am not worried about persuading people seeking donations because I am confident that if there were some barrier to my donating to, e.g., SI and FHI, I will manage to find other ways of purchasing utilons of comparable or almost-comparable efficiency.
One last thing I would say to donors and wanna-be donors is that this tendency towards resentment I have been describing in this comment (and the resulting inhibitory effect on my motivation) can be considered a feature (rather than a bug) of my personal psychology. In particular, it can be viewed as a form of pre-commitment to penalize (by withholding something I would otherwise be tempted to supply) certain behaviors which not only cause people like me to be overlooked and outcompeted for attractive jobs in charities, but also make the charitable world function less efficiently than it other would through a dynamic similar to a tragedy of the commons.
And this tendency I detect in myself really does feel like a precommitment in the sense that (as is true of almost all human precommitments that operate through the emotions) I have no recollection or impression of having chosen it and in the sense that it would probably require the expenditure of a very great deal of mental resources on my part to act contrary to it.
Wow. Coordination is hard ;)
Your explanation is more or less what I’d gathered from your earlier statement. It makes sense.
The org. that can convince passionate supporters of the cause to work for $ and donate may be different from the one that can get the most mainstream donations.
It is possible that this is just a phase I am going through, but if it is, it is a long phase.
This conversation suggests a good habit to practice: being open about how and why I feel about something real, or would about something hypothetical. Since it’s hard to separate internal openness from public openness, even though it’s really the internal practice I want, maybe airing real motivations/desires more often (as you just did) is better than my conservative semi-stoic default.