{"items": [{"author": "Miles", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170458683039403", "anchor": "fb-170458683039403", "service": "fb", "text": "One complication, Jeff -- I could put $10,000 into an account now. I could use it today (and then save X lives), or invest it and save say ... 10x lives a century from now. Which is better? To just say the 10x, wouldn't it suggest we should stop all charity now, invest in a powerful economy, and then ideally solve all human ills a couple centuries from now? Seems very ... Rand-ian.", "timestamp": "1318026760"}, {"author": "Ariel", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/113667834513475506190", "anchor": "gp-1318035684390", "service": "gp", "text": "I find it curious that you limit your thinking here to (1) giving resources in the form of money and (2) only to charities, when for many of the kinds of problems you mention, government or market action is a much more realistic and feasible solution. Although there are charities working on the problem of climate change, everyone I know in the field basically agrees that without significant government action leading to market incentives, there can be no real progress there (and that's also not that unpredictable a risk compared to, say, death-by-nanobots). Even for the more speculative ones you mention, I have a hard time imagining a situation in which a charity would be more equipped than a government to deal with an asteroid strike.", "timestamp": 1318035684}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170504026368202", "anchor": "fb-170504026368202", "service": "fb", "text": "@Miles: accepting your setup, investing the money and donating later makes sense. I don't think the setup is reasonable, however. You might predict that your long term rate of return, adjusted for inflation, was 2%. So your $10K today becomes $70K in 100 years. But there's a significant chance that society will collapse over a period that long. Potentially enough to bring the rate of return negative.
There's also the issue that you can do more good the sooner you start. The eradication of smallpox only had to be done once, and all later people have benefited from it. Effective development may have similar results, reducing poverty in an area having lasting effect.", "timestamp": "1318035959"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/103013777355236494008", "anchor": "gp-1318036542855", "service": "gp", "text": "@Ariel\n I'm approaching this from the perspective of \"how can I maximize the good I do\". I don't have an inherent objection to working in a field as opposed to giving money to support work in it, but as someone with a relatively high earnings capacity, I think I do better with the latter. As for why charities, they wouldn't necessarily have to do direct action. Perhaps I would give money to support research, evaluation, education, or advocacy.", "timestamp": 1318036542}, {"author": "Ariel", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/113667834513475506190", "anchor": "gp-1318037518742", "service": "gp", "text": "The reason I found it curious is because a number of these issues are connected to relatively high-earning fields (upper 5/lower 6 figures), so I don't think they're mutually exclusive.\n
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\nAdvocacy I definitely buy. I'm curious as to what you mean by evaluation, however, and I question what kind of effect education can have in dealing with highly speculative issues. As for charities funding research, that turns out to be a very difficult proposition. Most charities only have the budget to fund one or two projects and therefore run a high risk of basically getting taken in by bad scientists with good communication skills (I know of several instances of this happening). Although I don't have numbers to back this up, I would guess that, per dollar spent, corporate R&D is the most \"effective\", followed by government, followed by charitable grants.", "timestamp": 1318037518}, {"author": "Miles", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170515536367051", "anchor": "fb-170515536367051", "service": "fb", "text": "I think that (barring catastrophe taking out our society), 2% per annum is probably a low expectation. From a cursory bit of searching, 7-10% seems more reasonable.", "timestamp": "1318038473"}, {"author": "Miles", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170516469700291", "anchor": "fb-170516469700291", "service": "fb", "text": "Assuming 8% rate of return, no tax, 3.1% inflation, we're looking at $1.1M in inflation-adjusted dollars after 100 years. It seems to me the risk is less collapse than a change in the financial system which makes investments behave differently. But I still think money could be leveraged and survive, if not in the form of stock investments.", "timestamp": "1318038658"}, {"author": "Miles", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170516616366943", "anchor": "fb-170516616366943", "service": "fb", "text": "But calculating the impact of lives saved now it tough. Which perhaps is why the person referenced in your post was conflicted?", "timestamp": "1318038696"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/103013777355236494008", "anchor": "gp-1318038893084", "service": "gp", "text": "@Ariel\n \"I'm curious as to what you mean by evaluation\"\n
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\nIt might be useful to have a charity as an outside evaluator checking that the government antiastroid program is making progress and making a stink if it's not doing good work.\n
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\n\"I question what kind of effect education can have in dealing with highly speculative issues\"\n
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\nConsider the AI issue. There are some people who believe that there's a significant dancer that a general AI may be invented by people who have not given thought to what they call the \"friendlyness\" problem. This research paper describes some of the issues: \nhttp://singinst.org/upload/artificial-intelligence-risk.pdf\n Where education could come in is, if you think this is the right approach, teaching the people who might be in a position to invent an AI that this is something they should at least be aware of. This is quite similar to advocacy, really, but aimed at inventors and researchers instead of the government or general population.\n
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\n\"As for charities funding research, that turns out to be a very difficult proposition. Most charities only have the budget to fund one or two projects and therefore run a high risk of basically getting taken in by bad scientists with good communication skills\"\n
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\nWhy not just avoid small charities that don't have the resources to evaluate grant requests properly? There are certainly large charities doing a lot of research funding (\nhttp://sciencecampaign.org.uk/?p=344\n claims to fund 4K researchers, but my guess is they're doing some sort of numbers trickery) so that would be an option.", "timestamp": 1318038893}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170519709699967", "anchor": "fb-170519709699967", "service": "fb", "text": "A 4.9% real rate of return sounds high to me. But I also don't know much about this. Where do those numbers come from?", "timestamp": "1318039402"}, {"author": "George", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170530196365585", "anchor": "fb-170530196365585", "service": "fb", "text": "They come from looking at the last 100 years of equity prices and assuming you buy the S&P 500 or something.", "timestamp": "1318041399"}, {"author": "Ariel", "source_link": "https://plus.google.com/113667834513475506190", "anchor": "gp-1318042317016", "service": "gp", "text": "\"It might be useful to have a charity as an outside evaluator checking that the government antiastroid program is making progress and making a stink if it's not doing good work.\"\n
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\nYes, that's true, although you do of course get into \"who watches the watchmen\" issues. Anyway, I think that gets back to your previous note about how you evaluate the effectiveness of such a charity, how one defines \"good work\" in that case, etc.\n
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\nThe education suggestion is very strange to me for some reason. First of all, I don't think it's obvious to state that if we invented AI and were replaced by it, that it would be on balance a bad outcome (by whatever metric except perhaps maximizing the number of humans alive). More generally, although I do think that every researcher has a responsibility to consider all the possible effects of the implementation of his/her work, I also think that if it came down to a choice to not pursue groundbreaking scientific knowledge in order to avoid an uncertain bad outcome, most scientists would choose to pursue the research just due to the self-selection process. Perhaps more importantly, even if many scientists would choose to heed the risks, it only takes one to actually go there. But of course this has been a big debate about all scientific research for a long time. Also, again, I'm not sure how you could evaluate effectiveness there. \n
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\nFrom what I've turned up, the vast majority of charity-based research funding is for disease research (unsurprisingly). However, of all the possible catastrophes you mentioned, I feel that people who research infectious diseases and epidemics are perhaps most aware of the catastrophic possibilities.", "timestamp": 1318042317}, {"author": "Deanna", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170683473016924", "anchor": "fb-170683473016924", "service": "fb", "text": "I watched the 60 Minutes feature about the rise of children in poverty due to the recession. Donating to food banks and local soup kitchens is a way to help the present and the future by feeding the future United States' population who may be our future leaders in climate change, job creation/stabilization, innovations in medicine, etc, etc.", "timestamp": "1318081908"}, {"author": "Joshua", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=170686113016660", "anchor": "fb-170686113016660", "service": "fb", "text": "If you can figure out an effective way to help people (which is the challenging part) and make a significant impact in improving the lives of people now, the ecomonic impact of their improved lives could out-perform the stock market and they'd be likely to support the charity that helped them.", "timestamp": "1318082453"}, {"author": "Jeff Kaufman", "source_link": "https://www.facebook.com/jefftk/posts/170454939706444?comment_id=171204079631530", "anchor": "fb-171204079631530", "service": "fb", "text": "@Joshua: I'm with you up to the \"and they'd be likely to support the charity that helped them\". I don't think that's actually very likely.", "timestamp": "1318185539"}]}