Nick Bostrom has a good paper on Astronomical Waste: The Opportunity Cost of Delayed Technological Development, which argues that under most reasonable ethical systems that aren’t completely selfish or very parochial, our philanthropic activities ought to be devoted primarily toward preventing disasters that would cause the extinction of intelligent life.
Some people who haven’t thought about the Fermi Paradox carefully may overestimate the probability that most of the universe is already occupied by intelligent life. Very high estimates for that probability would invalidate Bostrom’s conclusion, but I haven’t found any plausible arguments that would justify that high a probability.
I don’t want to completely dismiss Malthusian objections that life in the distant future will be barely worth living, but the risk of a Malthusian future would need to be well above 50 percent to substantially alter the optimal focus of philanthropy, and the strongest Malthusian arguments that I can imagine leave much more uncertainty than that. (If I thought I could alter the probability of a Malthusian future, maybe I should devote effort to that. But I don’t currently know where to start).
Thus the conclusion seems like it ought to be too obvious to need repeating, but it’s far enough from our normal experiences that most of us tend to pay inadequate attention to it. So I’m mentioning it in order to remind people (including myself) of the need to devote more of our time to thinking about risks such as those associated with AI or asteroid impacts.
effective altruism
All posts tagged effective altruism
Book review: How to Spend $50 Billion to Make the World a Better Place, edited by Bjorn Lomborg.
This book makes plausible and somewhat thought-provoking claims about how an altruist ought to spend money to provide the most benefit to the needy. It concludes that high priorities should include control of HIV, malaria, malnutrition, and trade barriers.
It appears to come close to being a good book. It addresses fairly good questions about important issues. Unfortunately, it has been simplified for readability to such an extent as to prevent it from accomplishing much. Its arguments aren’t sufficiently detailed or backed by references for me to evaluate them. So they were probably intended to be accepted as a result of the authors’ authority. But their credentials leave plenty of room for doubt about how much deference their authority deserves.
So I’m left unsatisfied, and highly uncertain whether I ought to read the more detailed version of this book (Global Crises, Global Solutions).
Marginal Revolution summarizes an idea of Robin Hanson about how to overcome the problem of poor information regarding who is worthy of what charity (which I agree is a serious problem).
Unfortunately, I doubt it will work, because it suffers from very similar information problems as direct charity does. It requires donors to have good information about what a prototypical worthy recipient looks like (but having this information seems like a large part of the problem we are trying to solve), or else be able to hire someone who has better information about that than the donor (but Robin provides some strong reasons to doubt that is possible in his more recent paper He Who Pays The Piper Must Know The Tune).
I can imagine (but am unconvinced) that donors can describe the appropriate criteria for worthiness, and that the main information problem is distinguishing honest claims of meeting those criteria from dishonest claims. But the charity angels scheme rewards people for failing to distinguish honest claims, which makes me doubt that the giving that this scheme would encourage has much to do with truly worthy causes.
The “Tell Off A Jerk” variant on this theme seems closer to a workable idea, but it risks producing flame wars where people polarize into groups each of which uses charitable donations to encourage retaliation for the other group’s rude attempts at deterring jerkdom.