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Beware surprising and suspicious convergence — EA Forum

forum.effectivealtruism.org · 582 words · saved by 1 readers

Oliver: Oh! Well I think it is also the case that donating to the opera is best for improving human welfare too. Generally, what is best for one thing is usually not the best for something else, and thus Oliver’s claim that donations to opera are best for the arts and human welfare is surprising. We may suspect bias: that Oliver’s claim that the Opera is best for the human welfare is primarily motivated by his enthusiasm for opera and desire to find reasons in favour, rather than a cooler, more objective search for what is really best for human welfare. The rest of this essay tries to better establish what is going on (and going wrong) in cases like this. It is in three parts: the first looks at the ‘statistics’ of convergence - in what circumstances is it surprising to find one object judged best by the lights of two different considerations? The second looks more carefully at the claim of bias: how it might be substantiated, and how it should be taken into consideration. The third re

Hauke Hillebrandt 4y 37 0 0 1 Excellent and underrated post. I actually told Greg a few years ago that this has become part of my cognitive toolkit and that I use this often (I think there are similarities to the Tinbergen Rule - a basic principle of effective policy, which states that to achieve n independent policy targets you need at at least n independent policy instruments). This tool actually caused me to deprioritize crowdfunding with Let's Fund , which I realized was doing a multiobjective optimization problem (moving money to effective causes and doing research), and that I needed to

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