Nobody’s arguing against expected value maximization. The claim made in the final section of the post and by myself is that using explicit expected value maximization does not maximize expected value and that one can do better by mixing explicit expected value maximization with heuristics.
To see how this could be so, consider the case of finding the optimal way to act if one’s hand is on a very hot surface. We have an evolutionarily ingrained response of jerking our hand away which produces a better outcome than “consider all possible actions; calculate the expected value of each action and perform the one with the highest expected value.”
I think you’ve found the source of our disagreement here. I fully agree with the use of time-saving heuristics, I think the difference is that I want all my heuristics to ultimately be explicitly justified, not necessarily every time you use them, but at least once.
Knowing the reason for a heuristic is useful, it can help you refine it, it can tell you whether or not its safe to abandon it in certain situations, and sometimes it can alert you to one heuristic that really is just a bias. To continue with your example, I agree that checking whether it would be smart to take your hand of the cooker every single time is stupid, but I don’t see what’s wrong with at some point pausing for a moment, just to consider whether there might be unforeseen benefits to keeping your hand on the cooker (to my knowledge there aren’t).
An analogy can be made to mathematics, you don’t explicitly prove everything from the axioms, but you rely on established results which in turn rest on others and hopefully trace back to the axioms eventually, if that’s not the case you start to worry.
As a second point, time saving heuristics are at their most useful when time matters. For instance, if I had to choose a new charity every day, or if for some reason I only had ten minutes to choose one and my choice would then be set in stone for eternity, then time saving heuristics would be the order of the day. As I need only choose one, and can safely take days or even weeks to make that decision without harming the charities in any significant way, and furthermore can change my choice whenever I want if new information comes to light, it seems like the use of time-savers would be pure laziness on my part, and tha’ts just for me as an individual, for an organisation like Givewell which exists solely to perform this one task, they are inexcusable.
Possessing a given cognitive bias can be rational conditional on possessing another cognitive bias.
It can be beneficial, but not predictably so. If I know that I possess cognitive bias A, it is better to try to get rid of it than to introduce a second cognitive bias B.
Attempting to remove cognitive biases one at a time need not result in monotonic improvement.
Agreed, but it should result in improvement on average. Once again we come back to the issue of uncertainty aversion, whether its worthwhile to gamble when the odds are in your favour.
See Phil Goetz’s Reason as a memetic immune disorder.
I loved that when I first read it, but lately I’m unsure. If his hypothesis is correct, it would suggest that most religions are completely harmless in their ‘natural environment’, but excluding the last few centuries that doesn’t seem true.
The heuristics that we use are too numerous and of too much complexity to be possible to explicitly justify all of them. Turning your mathematics analogy on its head, note that mathematicians have very little knowledge of the heuristics that they use to discover and prove theorems. Poincare wrote some articles about this; if interested see The Value of Science.
There are over a million charities in the US alone. GiveWell currently has (around) 5 full time staff. If GiveWell were to investigate every charity this year. each staff member would have to investigate over 500 charities per day. Moreover, doing comparison of even two charities can be exceedingly tricky. I spent ~ 10 hours a week for five months investigating the cost effectiveness of school based deworming and I still don’t know whether it’s a better investment than bednets. So I strongly disagree that GiveWell shouldn’t use time saving heuristics.
As for for SIAI vs. VillageReach, it may well be that SIAI is a better fit for your values than VillageReach is. I currently believe that donating to SIAI has higher utilitarian expected value than donating to VillagReach but also presently believe that a few years of searching will yield a charity at least twice as cost-effective than either at the margin. I have been long been hoping for GiveWell to research x-risk charities. See my comment here. Over the next year I’ll be researching x-risk reduction charities myself.
It’s not clear to me that overcoming a generic bias should improve one’s rationality on average. This is an empirical question with no data but anecdotal evidence. Placebo effect and selection bias may suffice to explain a subjective sense that overcoming biases is conducive to rationality. Anyway, on the matter at hand, I concur with Holden’s view that relying entirely on explicit formulas does not maximize expected value and that one should incorporate some measure of subjective judgment (as to how much, I am undecided).
I currently believe that donating to SIAI has higher utilitarian expected value than donating to VillagReach but also presently believe that a few years of searching will yield a charity at least twice as cost-effective than either at the margin.
Interesting. Have you explained these beliefs anywhere?
There are over a million charities in the US alone. GiveWell currently has (around) 5 full time staff. If GiveWell were to investigate every charity this year. each staff member would have to investigate over 500 charities per day. Moreover, doing comparison of even two charities can be exceedingly tricky. I spent ~ 10 hours a week for five months investigating the cost effectiveness of school based deworming and I still don’t know whether it’s a better investment than bednets. So I strongly disagree that GiveWell shouldn’t use time saving heuristics.
Aren’t the numbers here a little specious? There may be over a million charities (is this including nonprofits which run social clubs? there are a lot of categories of nonprofits), but we can dismiss hundreds of thousands with just a cursory examination of their goals or their activity level. For example, could any sports-related charity come within an order of magnitude or two of a random GiveWell approved charity? Could any literary (or heck humanities charity) do that without specious Pascal’s Wager-type arguments?
This isn’t heuristic, this is simply the nature of the game. Some classes of activities just aren’t very useful from the utilitarian perspective. (Imagine Christianity approved of moving piles of sand with tweezers and hence there were a few hundred thousand charities surrounding this activity—every town or city has a charity or three providing subsidized sand pits and sand scholarships. If a GiveWell dismissed them all out of hand, would you attack that too as a heuristic?)
Notice the two examples you picked—deworming and bed nets. Both are already highly similar: public health measures. You didn’t pick, ‘buy new pews for the local church’ and ‘deworm African kids’.
This looks a lot like a heuristic to me. Is “heuristic” derogative around here?
Yes; heuristics allow errors and are suboptimal in many respects. (That’s why they are a ‘heuristic’ and not ‘the optimal algorithm’ or ‘the right answer’ or other such phrases.)
I don’t cite the sand mandalas both because they simply didn’t come to mind, and they’re quite beautiful.
I agree with most of what you say here, but fear that the discussion is veering in the direction of a semantics dispute. So I’ll just clarify my position by saying:
• Constructing an airtight argument for the relative lack of utilitarian value of e.g. all humanities charities relative to VillageReach is a nontrivial task (and indeed, may be impossible).
• Even if one limits oneself to the consideration of 10^(-4) of the field of all charities, one is still left with a very sizable analytical problem.
•The use of time saving heuristics is essential to getting anything valuable done.
I think you’ve found the source of our disagreement here. I fully agree with the use of time-saving heuristics, I think the difference is that I want all my heuristics to ultimately be explicitly justified, not necessarily every time you use them, but at least once.
Knowing the reason for a heuristic is useful, it can help you refine it, it can tell you whether or not its safe to abandon it in certain situations, and sometimes it can alert you to one heuristic that really is just a bias. To continue with your example, I agree that checking whether it would be smart to take your hand of the cooker every single time is stupid, but I don’t see what’s wrong with at some point pausing for a moment, just to consider whether there might be unforeseen benefits to keeping your hand on the cooker (to my knowledge there aren’t).
An analogy can be made to mathematics, you don’t explicitly prove everything from the axioms, but you rely on established results which in turn rest on others and hopefully trace back to the axioms eventually, if that’s not the case you start to worry.
As a second point, time saving heuristics are at their most useful when time matters. For instance, if I had to choose a new charity every day, or if for some reason I only had ten minutes to choose one and my choice would then be set in stone for eternity, then time saving heuristics would be the order of the day. As I need only choose one, and can safely take days or even weeks to make that decision without harming the charities in any significant way, and furthermore can change my choice whenever I want if new information comes to light, it seems like the use of time-savers would be pure laziness on my part, and tha’ts just for me as an individual, for an organisation like Givewell which exists solely to perform this one task, they are inexcusable.
It can be beneficial, but not predictably so. If I know that I possess cognitive bias A, it is better to try to get rid of it than to introduce a second cognitive bias B.
Agreed, but it should result in improvement on average. Once again we come back to the issue of uncertainty aversion, whether its worthwhile to gamble when the odds are in your favour.
I loved that when I first read it, but lately I’m unsure. If his hypothesis is correct, it would suggest that most religions are completely harmless in their ‘natural environment’, but excluding the last few centuries that doesn’t seem true.
Thanks for engaging with me.
The heuristics that we use are too numerous and of too much complexity to be possible to explicitly justify all of them. Turning your mathematics analogy on its head, note that mathematicians have very little knowledge of the heuristics that they use to discover and prove theorems. Poincare wrote some articles about this; if interested see The Value of Science.
There are over a million charities in the US alone. GiveWell currently has (around) 5 full time staff. If GiveWell were to investigate every charity this year. each staff member would have to investigate over 500 charities per day. Moreover, doing comparison of even two charities can be exceedingly tricky. I spent ~ 10 hours a week for five months investigating the cost effectiveness of school based deworming and I still don’t know whether it’s a better investment than bednets. So I strongly disagree that GiveWell shouldn’t use time saving heuristics.
As for for SIAI vs. VillageReach, it may well be that SIAI is a better fit for your values than VillageReach is. I currently believe that donating to SIAI has higher utilitarian expected value than donating to VillagReach but also presently believe that a few years of searching will yield a charity at least twice as cost-effective than either at the margin. I have been long been hoping for GiveWell to research x-risk charities. See my comment here. Over the next year I’ll be researching x-risk reduction charities myself.
It’s not clear to me that overcoming a generic bias should improve one’s rationality on average. This is an empirical question with no data but anecdotal evidence. Placebo effect and selection bias may suffice to explain a subjective sense that overcoming biases is conducive to rationality. Anyway, on the matter at hand, I concur with Holden’s view that relying entirely on explicit formulas does not maximize expected value and that one should incorporate some measure of subjective judgment (as to how much, I am undecided).
Interesting. Have you explained these beliefs anywhere?
No. I’ll try to explicate my thoughts soon. Thanks for asking.
Aren’t the numbers here a little specious? There may be over a million charities (is this including nonprofits which run social clubs? there are a lot of categories of nonprofits), but we can dismiss hundreds of thousands with just a cursory examination of their goals or their activity level. For example, could any sports-related charity come within an order of magnitude or two of a random GiveWell approved charity? Could any literary (or heck humanities charity) do that without specious Pascal’s Wager-type arguments?
This isn’t heuristic, this is simply the nature of the game. Some classes of activities just aren’t very useful from the utilitarian perspective. (Imagine Christianity approved of moving piles of sand with tweezers and hence there were a few hundred thousand charities surrounding this activity—every town or city has a charity or three providing subsidized sand pits and sand scholarships. If a GiveWell dismissed them all out of hand, would you attack that too as a heuristic?)
Notice the two examples you picked—deworming and bed nets. Both are already highly similar: public health measures. You didn’t pick, ‘buy new pews for the local church’ and ‘deworm African kids’.
This looks a lot like a heuristic to me. Is “heuristic” derogative around here?
Why not go with the real-world version? (Especially since it involves ritual destruction of those piles of sand.)
Yes; heuristics allow errors and are suboptimal in many respects. (That’s why they are a ‘heuristic’ and not ‘the optimal algorithm’ or ‘the right answer’ or other such phrases.)
I don’t cite the sand mandalas both because they simply didn’t come to mind, and they’re quite beautiful.
I agree with most of what you say here, but fear that the discussion is veering in the direction of a semantics dispute. So I’ll just clarify my position by saying:
• Constructing an airtight argument for the relative lack of utilitarian value of e.g. all humanities charities relative to VillageReach is a nontrivial task (and indeed, may be impossible).
• Even if one limits oneself to the consideration of 10^(-4) of the field of all charities, one is still left with a very sizable analytical problem.
•The use of time saving heuristics is essential to getting anything valuable done.