EA - Mini summaries of GPI papers by Jack Malde

Link to original articleWelcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Mini summaries of GPI papers, published by Jack Malde on November 2, 2022 on The Effective Altruism Forum.I have previously written about the importance of making global priorities research accessible to a wider range of people. Many people don’t have the time or desire to read academic papers, but the findings of the research are still hugely important and action-relevant.The Global Priorities Institute (GPI) has started producing paper summaries, but even these might have somewhat limited readership given their length. They are also time-consuming for GPI to develop and aren’t all in one place.With this in mind, and given my personal interest in global priorities research, I have written a few mini-summaries of GPI papers. The extra lazy / time poor can read just “The bottom lines”. I would welcome feedback on if these samples are useful and if I should continue to make them - working towards a post with all papers summarised. It is impossible to cover everything in just a few bullet points, but I hope my summaries successfully inform of the main arguments and key takeaways. Please note that for the final two summaries I made use of the existing GPI paper summaries.On the desire to make a difference (Hilary Greaves, William MacAskill, Andreas Mogensen and Teruji Thomas)The bottom line: Preferring to make a difference yourself is in deep tension with the ideals of benevolence. If we are to be benevolent, we should solely care about how much total good is done. In practice, this means avoiding tendencies to diversify individual philanthropic portfolios or to neglect mitigation of extinction risks in favour of neartermist options that seem “safer”.My brief summary:One can consider various types of “difference-making preferences” (DMPs), where one wants to do good themselves. One example is thinking of the difference one makes in terms of their own causal impact. This can make the world worse e.g. going to great lengths to be the one to save a drowning person even if other people are better placed to do so. This way of thinking is therefore in tension with benevolence.One can instead hope to have higher outcome-comparison impact, where one compares how much better an outcome is if one acts, compared to if one does nothing. This would recommend not trying to save the drowning person, which seems the correct conclusion. However, the authors note that thinking of doing good in this way can still be in tension with benevolence. For example, one might prefer that a recent disaster were severe rather than mild so that they can do more good by helping affected people.Under uncertainty, DMPs are also in tension with benevolence, in an action-relevant way. For example, being risk averse to the difference one individually makes sometimes means choosing an action that is (stochastically) dominated by another action - essentially choosing an action that is ‘objectively’ worse under uncertainty, with respect to doing good.This can also be the case when people interact - the authors show that the presence of DMPs in collective action problems with uncertainty can lead to sub-optimal outcomes. Importantly they show that the preferences themselves are the culprits. This is also the case with DMPs under ambiguity aversion (ambiguity aversion means preferring known risks over unknown risks).One could try to rationalise DMPs by saying people are trying to achieve ‘meaning’ in their life. But people who exhibit DMPs are generally motivated by the ideal of benevolence. It seems therefore that such people, if they really do want to be benevolent, should give up their DMPs.See paper here.The unexpected value of the future (Hayden Wilkinson)The bottom line: An undefined expected value of the future doesn’t invalidate longtermism. A theory is developed to deal with undefined expe...