Tom Barnes
Bio
Currently: Applied Researcher at Founders Pledge, Assistant Fund Manager at EAIF
Previously: Visiting Fellow at Rethink Priorities, PPE student at Warwick, EA Warwick Fellowship co-ordinator.
Posts 6
Comments14
Topic contributions1
I'll +1 everything Johannes has already said, and add that several people (including myself) have been chewing over the "how to rate longtermist projects" question for quite some time. I'm unsure when we will post something publicly, but I hope it won't be too far in the future.
If anyone is curious for details feel free to reach out!
This looks super interesting, thanks for posting! I especially appreciate the "How to apply" section
One thing I'm interested in is seeing how this actually looks in practice - specifying real exogenous uncertainties (e.g. about timelines, takeoff speeds, etc), policy levers (e.g. these ideas, different AI safety research agendas, etc), relations (e.g. between AI labs, governments, etc) and performance metrics (e.g "p(doom)", plus many of the sub-goals you outline). What are the conclusions? What would this imply about prioritization decisions? etc
I appreciate this would be super challenging, but if you are aware of any attempts to do it (even if using just a very basic, simplifying model), I'd be curious to hear how it's gone
Should recent ai progress change the plans of people working on global health who are focused on economic outcomes?
I think so, see here or here for a bit more discussion on this
If you think that AI will go pretty well by default (which I think many neartermists do)
My guess/impression is that this just hasn't been discussed by neartermists very much (which I think is one sad side-effect from bucketing all AI stuff in a "longtermist" worldview)
Great question!
One can claim Gift Aid on a donation to the Patient Philanthropy Fund (PPF), e.g. if donating through Giving What We Can. So a basic rate taxpayer gets a 25% "return" on the initial donation (via gift aid). The fund can then be expected to make a financial return equivalent to an index fund (~10% p.a for e.g. S&P 500).
So, if you buy the claim that your expected impact will be 9x larger in 10 years than today, then a £1,000 donation today will have an expected (mean) impact of £11,250, for longtermist causes (£1,000 * 1.25 * 9)[1]
Therefore I think the question of:
"donate now and claim gift aid" OR "invest then donate later"
...can be reframed as:
"donate now and claim gift aid" OR "donate to (e.g. PPF) now and claim gift aid, for the PPF to invest and then donate later"
(I.e. I think gift aid considerations don't favour one option over the other)
Of course, one may reasonably disagree on giving now vs giving later - this is a much more messy question, and one that I won't attempt to answer here.
I'm not sure about paying into an organisation's fund.
I think that conditional on giving later, the PPF is a better option than individually taking an "investing to give" approach (roughly for reasons described here)
(disclaimer: I work on the operations side of the PPF)
- ^
A £1,000 donation becomes $1,250 for a basic rate taxpayer. Over 10 years, expected impact will increase by 9x (using the Investing to Give report model's mean estimate)
Using the same logic for global health or animal welfare, your expected (mean) impact from a £1,000 donation in 10 years would be £2,625 (£1,000 * 1.25 * 2.1x) and £5,250 (£1,000 * 1.25 * 4.2x).
Note however that no "PPF equivalent" for global health or animal welfare currently exists, AFAIK
I think this could be an interesting avenue to explore. One very basic way to (very roughly) do this is to model p(doom) effectively as a discount rate. This could be an additional user input on GiveWell's spreadsheets.
So for example, if your p(doom) is 20% in 20 years, then you could increase the discount rate by roughly 1% per year
[Techinically this will be somewhat off since (I'm guessing) most people's p(doom) doesn't increase at a constant rate, in the way a fixed discount rate does.]
Rob Besinger of MIRI tweets:
...I'm happy to say that MIRI leadership thinks "humanity never builds AGI" would be the worst catastrophe in history, would cost nearly all of the future's value, and is basically just unacceptably bad as an option.
Just to add that the Research Institute for Future Design (RIFD) is a Founders Pledge recommendation for longtermist institutional reform
(disclaimer: I am a researcher at Founders Pledge)
OpenPhil might be in a position to expand EA’s expected impact if it added a cause area that allowed for more speculative investments in Global Health & Development.
My impression is that Open Philanthropy's Global Health and Development team already does this? For example, OP has focus areas on Global aid policy, Scientific research and South Asian air quality, areas which are inherently risky/uncertain.
They have also take a hit based approach philosophically, and this is what distinguishes them from GiveWell - see e.g.
Hits. We are explicitly pursuing a hits-based approach to philanthropy with much of this work, and accordingly might expect just one or two “hits” from our portfolio to carry the whole. In particular, if one or two of our large science grants ended up 10x more cost-effective than GiveWell’s top charities, our portfolio to date would cumulatively come out ahead. In fact, the dollar-weighted average of the 33 BOTECs we collected above is (modestly) above the 1,000x bar, reflecting our ex ante assessment of that possibility. But the concerns about the informational value of those BOTECs remain, and most of our grants seems noticeably less likely to deliver such “hits".
[Reposting my comment here from previous version]
I think this is mostly correct, with the caveat that we don't exclusively rely on qualitative factors and subjective judgement alone. The way I'd frame it is more as a spectrum between
[Heuristics] <------> [GiveWell-style cost-effectiveness modelling]
I think I'd place FP's longtermist evaluation methodology somewhere between those two poles, with flexibility based on what's feasible in each cause