
Paul English Shares His Approach to Effective Giving - Mz
http://www.forbes.com/sites/leiladebruyne/2016/12/29/paul-english-shares-his-secrets-to-effective-giving/#c951e9f43e6a
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Teodolfo
I would love to read an approach to effective political giving. Does anyone
know of such a document? If the effective altruism movement had focussed on
political action and donations instead of private charity to supply bed nets
we might have a much better world (including money for bed nets).

~~~
michaelt

      Does anyone know of such a document?
    

Sure, take a look at [1] and [2].

Of course, with bed nets and schistosomiasis treatments, you can perform 1% of
the intervention and demonstrate 1% of lives saved (although it might take
years to see the full benefits from things like better school attendance)
which obviously isn't the case for political interventions.

[1] [https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/research/other-
causes/politi...](https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/research/other-
causes/political-change/) [2]
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130501081159/http://givingwhat...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130501081159/http://givingwhatwecan.org/sites/givingwhatwecan.org/files/attachments/results_writeup_draft_v3.pdf)

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cgag
He's a good recent resource on choosing effective charities:

[https://80000hours.org/2016/12/the-effective-altruism-
guide-...](https://80000hours.org/2016/12/the-effective-altruism-guide-to-
donating-this-giving-season/?source=fb)

~~~
madhadron
Any ranking of problems that puts risks to mankind from artificial
intelligence as the most pressing problem can't be taken seriously. I realize
that it's become trendy in software to think this is actually a threat, but
that's more of a marker of an in-group made possible by the collective
ignorance of that in-group of the relevant fields of knowledge.

~~~
cgag
Feel free to poke holes in the arguments. I mostly see is people just
dismissing it on a gut level "it's ridiculous".

Or just donate to the against malaria foundation.

~~~
madhadron
Fair enough. I guess I'll engage with this silliness once. Let's start with
the basics. There's this vague, handwaving notion of "intelligence." In the
community pontificating about this it seems to be operationalized as a
combination of manipulating abstractions and extracting new, higher level
entities from lower levels of abstraction. For the latter, the only AI work to
date that I am aware of on the latter is Drescher's 'Made-up Minds'. Multi-
layered neural nets end up with interior points that map to some sort of
features, but there is a big jump from that to a system being able to develop
an abstraction and then operate in terms of it. For the former, computers are
very good at it because humans built them as tools to extend the human ability
to do it, just like we built hammers because our hands are kind of a lousy
tool to hit things with. There is an illusion of sudden, dramatic progress on
this kind of intelligence because curves with lots of parameters (neural nets,
SVMs, etc.) can fit all kinds of things if you can get the fit to converge.
The advances in machine learning have been tricks to get fits to converge and
ways of mapping data into spaces where we know how to get fits to converge.
This isn't a denigration of the field. It's given us enormous capabilities
that we didn't have before, but we need to be clear about what it is before we
start extrapolating: curve fitting. Machine learning today lets us fit curves
in order to engineer task specific algorithms. And even that is already going
to get strongly restricted over the next few years as legal requirements get
piled on to not discriminate against protected classes, provide an appealable
argument that can be subjected to a reasonable person standard in a court of
law, and a pile of other stuff.

Plus all of this ignores the wide range of forms of intelligence that
psychologists have identified. The sociological reason why that's so are
interesting in their own right. The stories the practitioners tell about
themselves are about brilliant individuals grappling with hard symbolic
problems and conquering themselves, and that is the view they project on
intelligence rather than a more nuanced, realistic one.

Then there is the link from some form of symbolic intelligence to reshaping
the world. Let's take a quote from
[http://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/ai-
ri...](http://www.openphilanthropy.org/research/cause-reports/ai-risk) which I
think is representative:

> There was therefore relatively little time for evolutionary pressure to lead
> to improvements in human intelligence relative to the intelligence of our
> hominid ancestors, suggesting that the increases in intelligence may be
> small on some absolute scale. Yet it seems that these increases in
> intelligence have meant the difference between mammals with a limited impact
> on the biosphere and a species that has had massive impact.

This makes very strong assumptions about what drove the shaping of the
environment by Homo sapiens. Chimpanzees engage in coordinated problem solving
behavior. So do dolphins (and they have engaged humans in their solutions).
For most of the history of Homo sapiens we operated at levels not very
different. So what led to the accumulation of discoveries that culminated in
our modern world? The ability to transmit behavior abstractly was a big one.
The ability to engage larger social groups by using language for grooming
instead of picking lice off. We know that humans have differences in their
mental structure that let us retain vastly larger vocabularies than gorillas
or chimpanzees, but that's important for transmission of behaviors rather than
social grooming. The accumulation of behaviors that led to our modern world is
much more akin to natural selection than it is the model of a lone genius
thinking up something.

I have yet to see any indication that there is some superhuman level of
various kinds of intelligence in the offing or a link between that and major
effect on the world.

------
simonebrunozzi
I don't read Forbes online, because it's full of malware [1].

Can someone summarize the content of the article?

[1]:
[https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbe...](https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20160111/05574633295/forbes-
site-after-begging-you-turn-off-adblocker-serves-up-steaming-pile-malware-
ads.shtml)

