The GiveWell Blog

Excited altruism

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Critics of effective altruism worry that we’re trying to choose causes based on calculations about how to help the world as much as possible, rather than based on what causes excite us. They worry that we therefore won’t be fully engaged in, or committed to, the causes we pick. (More)

I think such people fundamentally misunderstand effective altruism. I think they imagine that we have passions for particular causes, and are trying to submerge our passions in the service of rationality. That isn’t the case. Rather, effective altruism is what we are passionate about. We’re excited by the idea of making the most of our resources and helping others as much as possible.

This post focuses on my own attitude toward effective altruism, though I believe it is broadly shared by many others in the movement.

In a nutshell: trying to maximize the good I accomplish with both my hours and my dollars is an intellectually engaging challenge. It makes my life feel more meaningful and more important. It’s a way of trying to have an impact and significance beyond my daily experience. In other words, it meets the sort of non-material needs that many people have.

Effective altruism does not prioritize intellect over emotion

When considering which particular causes I find interesting, I can’t answer the question “How excited am I about the cause?” without asking questions like “How important is the cause?” and “Is it already crowded with other funders?” Throughout my life, my excitement to work on a problem has been directly related to how “neglected” the problem seems (relative to its importance). I’d have trouble sustaining interest in a cause if I felt that I could do more good by switching to another.

I’m not describing how I “should” think or “try to” think. I’m describing what excites me. The causes I find most “under-invested in,” and the general process of finding them, is what gets me out of bed in the morning excited to go to work. This excitement is what drove the all-nighters that started GiveWell, and I believe I couldn’t be as motivated or put in as much effort on any other project.

Effective altruism is not about sacrifice

I’m always a bit put off when I see effective altruists being characterized as “selfless” or “sacrificing.” Speaking for myself and Elie: we don’t consider ourselves unusually “selfless,” and there has been no sacrifice whatsoever involved in our starting GiveWell. Compared to when we worked in finance, we find our work more interesting, more exciting, more motivating, and better for meeting people that we have strong connections with, all of which easily makes up for pay cuts that haven’t much affected our lifestyles. I can’t speak for people like Jason Trigg or Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman, but Julia Wise’s most recent post implies that she sees altruism as a source of joy, not something for which joy is traded.

To anyone who’s tempted to respond, “I just don’t believe that people can get excited about something like that,” I’d respond that there is a very wide range of things people are known to get excited about, many of which seem strange to outsiders. This is true of casual interests (bird-watching, stamp-collecting, spectator sports, fantasy sports) and of more serious interests, including a very wide variety of religious and spiritual values and practices. Some see effective altruism as more like a hobby, while others see it as more like a religious or spiritual value (or as implied by their religious or spiritual values); in all cases, effective altruists are engaging in the very common practice of having an interest that goes beyond their everyday lives and immediate needs. There’s absolutely nothing unusual about caring a great deal about such an interest; giving up some tangible things for the sake of such an interest; and using intellectual reasoning in pursuing such an interest.

Athletes sometimes talk about “giving 110%” or “leaving it all on the field” – they can’t be satisfied with their effort if they feel they held anything back. I feel similarly about strategic cause selection. If I passed up an opportunity to do good because it didn’t appeal to pre-existing personal interests, or because it involved too much abstract reasoning, I’d feel as though I’d failed to “leave it all on the field.”

Note that this doesn’t mean I’m willing to give up everything else I value and enjoy for effective altruism – I’m not. But when I’m engaged in altruism-oriented activities, I want to be fully engaged.

I expect the effective altruism movement to grow

So far, I’ve been somewhat surprised at how few people seem to share my interest in effective altruism. Many people want to help others, and many apply a great deal of both intellect and passion to doing so, but few seem to be asking the question: “What issue should I work on in order to have as much positive impact as possible?”

But my guess is that more people will be asking this question as time goes on. I believe that there are fairly robust trends in each of the following areas:

  • The world is becoming wealthier. More of us are securely able to satisfy our own material needs.
  • The world is becoming more unequal. The differences between the privileged and the disadvantaged are reaching levels that seem to compel action.
  • The world is getting better at transmitting information. More than ever before, we have the tools to learn just how privileged we are, to learn what actions are available to us, to sort through the available information, and to make informed decisions. We also have the tools to transfer our resources across the world with high efficiency and precision.

Today, anyone with a spare $100 has the ability to learn how relatively fortunate they are, to learn about their many options for making a difference, and to take truly meaningful and impactful action. In such a world, I expect a growing number of people to be asking the question, “How can I make the most of this opportunity?” And I hope they’ll ask it not from a place of guilt and obligation, but from a place of self-actualization and excitement.

Effective altruism

(updated on: ) | by Holden

We’re proud to be part of the nascent “effective altruist” movement. Effective altruism has been discussed elsewhere (see Peter Singer’s TED talk and Wikipedia); this post gives our take on what it is and isn’t.

What is effective altruism?
To us, “effective altruism” means trying to do as much good as possible with each dollar and each hour that we have. It’s a way of thinking about morality that insists on maximization of good accomplished, and not just satisficing of rules and guidelines. To us, this implies

  • Focusing on how one’s actions are likely to affect the world, rather than on how they affect oneself and one’s feelings. Effective altruism is consistent with believing that giving benefits the giver, but it’s not consistent with making this the driving goal of giving. Effective altruists often take pride in their willingness to give (either time or money) based on arguments that others might find too intellectual or abstract, and their refusal to give suboptimally even when a pitch is emotionally compelling. The primary/driving goal is to help others, not to feel good about oneself. (This doesn’t mean that effective altruists aren’t passionate about what they do or don’t obtain emotional rewards; it means feeling this passion and obtaining these rewards comes from focusing on impact.)
  • Being open to working on any cause, rather than committing to a cause up-front based on pre-existing personal interests. Strategic cause selection is based on the notion that one can do much more good working on some issues than on others.
  • Thinking of all beliefs as being open to change, and therefore potentially worthy of debate and analysis. Effective altruists research and debate a broad range of topics, from estimates of how to improve lives as much as possible per dollar to how such estimates should be used to what counts as a life to whether it’s better to give now or later (and many more). The consequences of a shift in views – including on relatively abstract topics – can be large, so one should not take any questions “off the table” by declaring that only one answer is acceptable.
  • Being open to unconventional approaches to doing good. For example, effective altruists often choose to devote themselves to for-profit activities, perhaps because they’re earning to give and perhaps because they believe these activities are themselves promising ways to improve the world. Doing lucrative for-profit work isn’t usually – or stereotypically – identified with being “humanitarian” or “altruistic,” but for effective altruists it can be a serious option.
  • Using one’s investigative resources efficiently. We’ll never have all the information we need to make knowably optimal decisions. Effective altruism means focusing one’s debates, analysis and research on questions that will bear tangible fruit in terms of informing our decisions about how to accomplish good. 

    Different groups in the movement have different views of what this means. Some believe it is important to focus on philosophical questions (such as “should we value enabling a birth similarly to averting a death?”) that seem in some sense “fundamental” and highly consequential in determining what outcomes we should aim for. We take a different view: we believe that questions like these, important though they may be, often aren’t amenable to tangible progress through further investigation. We prefer to focus our resources on questions that combine “importance” with “tractability to further investigation.”

Effective altruism is unusual and controversial
To many readers of this blog, the above qualities might sound like self-evidently good ones. But we don’t believe that’s how most people see them.

As GiveWell and Good Ventures have explored what causes to get involved in, the single most common advice we’ve gotten has been to “choose what you’re passionate about.” When we’ve described our desire to do “strategic cause selection” – choosing causes based on how we can accomplish the most good – we’ve seen a good deal of pushback and skepticism. It’s common for people to emphasize the importance of “starting from the heart,” and to fear that our commitment to a cause won’t be genuine (and won’t be robust) if it comes from a strategic, analysis-based choice.

This concern is reminiscent of David Brooks’s reaction to the idea of “earning to give”:

If you choose a profession that doesn’t arouse your everyday passion for the sake of serving instead some abstract faraway good, you might end up as a person who values the far over the near. You might become one of those people who loves humanity in general but not the particular humans immediately around … Instead of seeing yourself as one person deeply embedded in a particular community, you may end up coolly looking across humanity as a detached god.

…when most people pick a vocation, they don’t only want one that will be externally useful. They want one that they will enjoy, and that will make them a better person. They want to find that place, as the novelist Frederick Buechner put it, “where your deep gladness and the world’s deep hunger meet.”

I believe that these concerns misunderstand effective altruism. Effective altruism isn’t an alternative to having personal interests and passions; it is a personal interest and passion. Our next post will elaborate.

Passive vs. rational vs. quantified

| by Holden

We’re excited about the project of making giving more analytical, more intellectual, and overall more rational. At the same time, we have mixed feelings about the project of quantifying good accomplished: of converting the impacts of all gifts into “cost per life saved” or “cost per DALY” type figures that can then be directly compared to each other.

We believe that these two projects are too often confused. Many expect (or assume) GiveWell to make all its recommendations on the basis of “cost per unit of good” formulas, and it often seems that the rare people who want to be intellectual and rational about their giving are overly interested in explicit quantification.

It seems to us that attitudes toward giving are most often classified as “emotional/intuitive” or “rational/quantitative.” We think this framing is problematic on multiple fronts. We don’t think that “rational” should be opposed to “emotional,” and we also don’t think that the very real problems of “quantitative” should be used to tar all those who seek a “rational” approach.

We propose what we think is a better framing: distinguishing “passive,” “rational” and “quantified” decisionmaking. For each, we discuss both how this style of decisionmaking approaches a “normal” purchasing decision – buying a printer – and how it approaches giving.

Passive

Passive decisionmaking follows the path of least resistance, favoring options that are salient and/or easy to choose.

A passive approach to buying a printer might involve buying the first printer that comes up in a search, or the first affordable printer that one sees in a store, or the printer suggested by a friend.

A passive approach to giving might involve supporting a charity that calls on the phone, or giving to a charity that a friend is fundraising for. It might also involve reacting directly to short-term emotional incentives: for example, a charity that tells a compelling story can induce immediate guilt/cognitive dissonance prior to a donation, and/or immediate emotional reward after a donation. Supporting such a charity can often be “easier” (in a short-term sense) than not supporting it.

We believe this describes the way most people choose charities to support.

Rational

Rational decisionmaking involves an effort to make the best possible choice (according to the decisionmaker’s values) between all viable alternatives, given constraints on how much information is available and what resources are available to gather more information.

A rational approach to buying a printer might involve a process such as

  • Searching for “printer” on Amazon and using Amazon ranking, user reviews, and price as initial filters (e.g., making a list of printers that are within the price range and have strong user reviews).
  • Creating a document in which the different options can be viewed side by side in terms of a variety of metrics, such as printing speed, printing quality, desk footprint, etc.
  • Googling “printer,” searching for rankings and editorials, and entering noteworthy praise or criticism into the document.
  • Asking friends for comments on their experiences and entering those into the document as well, as warranted.
  • Looking at all the collected information, narrowing the field further based on particularly important criteria, perhaps creating some limited aggregated indices for comparison, and making a decision that considers – but does not commit to a formula regarding – the available information.
  • Talking to people about one’s decision and reasoning and seeing whether one has missed any important considerations.

Of course, the amount of effort that is put in depends on how important the decision is (as well as on how much time the decisionmaker has available). In the case of a printer, the above process might or might not be overkill.

In our view, a process broadly similar to this is appropriate for choosing a charity to give to (or a cause to invest in), especially when giving a relatively large amount. We seek to:

  • Consider a wide range of possible options.
  • Narrow the field in successive stages, using the best heuristics we can come up with.
  • Use both internal and outward-facing discussion to identify key questions that might be both (a) important to our bottom line and (b) tractable to further investigation.
  • Investigate such questions and write up what we find.
  • Collect all of the information into one place and thoroughly discuss it (again, both internally and externally) before making a final decision.

This approach has clear differences with the “passive” approach, but the differences are not – in my view – about “heart vs. head.” In fact, if anything, I think the rational approach is more likely to be associated with strong emotion. People often try hardest to take a “rational” approach when making their most high-stakes, emotionally important decisions; the “passive” approach is more common for decisions that are considered inconsequential.

Quantified

Quantified decisionmaking (as defined for the purposes of this post) involves committing to a universal metric for comparing all options and then formally quantifying options in terms of this metric.

A quantified approach to buying a printer might involve

  • Developing a metric such as “Net present-value dollars gained” for judging printers.
  • For each printer, estimating things such as
    • The expected time and convenience gained by being able to print things from home, and the present value of this time and convenience in dollars – including scenarios in which the alternative would be to print from a copy shop, scenarios in which the alternative would be to ask friends to print, and scenarios in which the alternative would be to refrain from printing a document and instead read it on the computer or rely on one’s memory.
    • The expected time lost to repairing or replacing the printer (a function of its reliability as estimated from reviews and friends’ comments), again converted to present-value dollars.
    • The monetary value of the desk space taken up by the printer.
  • Creating an estimate of each relevant parameter, sometimes informed by facts and sometimes mostly based on guesswork.
  • Calculating the “net present-value dollars gained” for each contending printer, making adjustments that come up on sanity checks, and purchasing the printer with the highest final score.

In our view, this approach is analogous to giving based purely on expected DALYs averted per dollar spent.

To be clear, we think this approach has some definite merits when applied to giving. We have found cost-effectiveness analysis to be highly valuable for the degree to which it brings implicit assumptions to the foreground. It often spurs debates that wouldn’t have happened otherwise, and it may provide clarity into our thinking that couldn’t be obtained in any other way. Perhaps it would accomplish similar things when applied to purchasing a printer. And this method is almost certain to be the best method when all of the relevant parameters can be estimated with high precision (this is not the case either with buying a printer or with giving to a charity, but may be the case for simpler and/or more technical questions.)

The weakness of this approach, in my view, is that it takes an enormous amount of effort to do well, and even when done well generally involves so much guesswork and uncertainty that it’s questionable whether the results should influence one’s prior beliefs. Valid, high-certainty information that should shift one’s view (for example, “this printer takes up a lot of space”) can be lost in the noise of all the guesswork used to convert the information into a unified framework (for example, converting the space taken up into dollars gained).

When using a single unified equation, one mistake – or omitted parameter – can result in a completely wrong conclusion, even if much of the other analysis that was done is sound. The “rational” approach uses implicit model combination and adjustment, and is more likely to give a good answer even when not all of the inputs are reliable. It can also be more efficient in the sense of view-shifting information gained per person-hour spent.

Conclusion

GiveWell exists to promote rational giving as opposed to passive giving. It doesn’t necessarily seek to promote quantified giving.

When rational and quantified giving are too strongly associated, rational giving suffers from the association. There are many legitimate criticisms of quantified giving that do not apply to rational giving, and future posts will advance some of these.

The primary purpose of this post was to draw as clear a distinction as we could. We don’t want to see the important and exciting project of “rational giving” remain tied to the much more limited and less exciting project of “quantified giving.”

Update on GiveWell’s web traffic / money moved: Q2 2013

(updated on: ) | by Natalie Crispin

In addition to evaluations of other charities, GiveWell publishes substantial evaluation of itself, from the quality of its research to its impact on donations. We publish quarterly updates regarding two key metrics: (a) donations to top charities and (b) web traffic.

The table and chart below present basic information about our growth in money moved and web traffic in the first half of 2013 (note 1).

Summary statistics: first two quarters

Growth in money moved accelerated in the second quarter. At the end of the first quarter, donations from donors giving less than $5,000 per year were up 45% year over year (note 2). This figure rose to 100% by the end of the second quarter. This increase is likely due mostly to media attention in the second quarter, including a TED Talk by Peter Singer, a piece on Washington Post’s Wonkblog and subsequent debate on various blogs, and a New York Times article.

A caveat to the above is that it is based solely on small donors. In the past we’ve seen that growth in small donors earlier in the year provides an indication of overall growth at the end of the year, but because a significant proportion of our money moved comes from a relatively small set of large donors, we don’t place significant weight on this projection.

Website traffic tends to peak in December of each year (circled in the chart below). Growth in web traffic has generally remained strong in 2013. So far in 2013, there have been 408,782 monthly unique visitors (calculated as the sum of unique visitors in each month) to the website, compared with 233,550 at this time in 2012, or 75% annual growth.

Note 1: Since our 2012 annual metrics report we have shifted to a reporting year that starts on February 1, rather than January 1, in order to better capture year-on-year growth in the peak giving months of December and January. Therefore metrics for the first half of 2013 reported here are for February through July.

Note 2: The majority of the funds GiveWell moves come from a relatively small number of donors giving larger gifts. These larger donors tend to give in December, and we have found that, in past years, growth in donations from smaller donors throughout the year has provided a reasonable estimate of the growth from the larger donors by the end of the year.

In total, GiveWell donors have directed $1,433,139 to our top charities this year, compared with $1,018,625 at this point in 2012. For the reason described, we don’t find this number to be particularly meaningful at this time of year.

 

Responses to objections on cash transfers

(updated on: ) | by Holden

Since our recommendation of GiveDirectly last year, we’ve seen a fair amount of pushback and skepticism. We’ve recently been speaking with donors who have supported our other top charities – and not GiveDirectly – to get a better sense of what their reservations are.

This post lays out what we see as the most common objections people have expressed to our recommendation of GiveDirectly, and our responses to such objections. Most of our responses have already been written up previously, so to a large extent this post simply attempts to consolidate them.

At this point, we feel that we have put substantial effort into understanding and responding to people’s reservations about cash transfers, and after considering all objections we fully stand behind our ranking of GiveDirectly. We encourage those who continue to disagree with us to comment on this post, highlighting which objections they find most important (including any we may have missed) and laying out what they see as weaknesses in our responses.

  • Objection 1: the case for cash relies on intuition, while the case for bednets and deworming relies on rigorous research. We disagree with this, and have written that the evidence bases for cash transfers and deworming are comparable.
  • Objection 2: the studies used to support the case for cash transfers aren’t applicable to the case of GiveDirectly. For example, key studies were of conditional cash transfers, while GiveDirectly makes unconditional cash transfers. We acknowledge this concern but believe that it does not apply to cash transfers any more than to deworming. In both cases (and to a lesser degree in the case of bednets), there are important differences between the programs that were studied and the programs that are being carried out today, but there are also important reasons not to dismiss the studies that are available. More at the same post linked above: Evidence of Impact for Long-term Benefits.
  • Objection 3: it’s intuitively implausible that $1000 in cash for a single family (much of which is often spent on a metal roof) can do as much good as, say, 200 distributed bednets or 2000 deworming treatments. We believe that a closer study of the evidence behind all three interventions makes the case much more plausible. While we do believe bednets and deworming have strong evidence behind them, the evidence points to very small per-person effects that add up to a lot only when looked at across a large population. (We aren’t confident that deworming’s benefits are non-negligible.) Our cost-effectiveness comparisons imply that bednets and deworming are around 2-5x more cost-effective than cash, which isn’t a large multiplier: if deworming cost $2.50 instead of $0.50, or if bednets cost $25 each, we believe the calculation would weigh in favor of cash transfers (though we would guess that the same intuitive arguments would be voiced).
  • Objection 4: GiveWell concedes that cash transfers are 2-5x less cost-effective (in terms of “good accomplished per dollar”) than bednets and deworming; therefore, there would need to be overwhelming considerations on other factors (such as “upside” and “learning opportunities”) to justify giving to GiveDirectly instead. Broadly speaking, we think this objection overstates the reliability, and importance, of (a) abstract estimates of how much good an intervention does relative to (b) confidence in the organization and people behind implementation. Aside from the very real considerations of “upside” and “learning opportunities” (discussed briefly here), we think that the details of implementation matter greatly, and we don’t believe it’s wise to be confident in or dismissive of such details when one has little window into them. For more, see
  • Objection 5: giving out cash has more potential to do harm than bednet distribution or deworming programs. We broadly agree with this claim, but we also think that bednets and deworming each have higher probabilities of having negligible positive impact. Because bednets and deworming are very specific solutions to very specific problems, they’re less likely to empower people to do self-damaging things, but also more likely to turn out to be unhelpful if the details of the scenario are different from what our analysis suggests. (To give some specific examples: bednets may be ineffective in areas of high insecticide resistance, and deworming ultimately may have negligible impact overall.) In addition, large-scale government cash transfer programs are widespread and largely well regarded, implying that the scope of any harms that have emerged is limited. More to the point, the evidence we’ve reviewed is designed to capture average total impacts (positive and negative), and (as stated above) we believe that the evidence suggests a positive net impact for cash transfers that is of the same ballpark magnitude as the positive net impacts of bednets and deworming. We also don’t find the specific concerns that have been raised about cash transfers to be highly compelling, especially when juxtaposed with the data from GiveDirectly’s followup surveys.
  • Objection 6: cash transfers have worked poorly, or would work poorly, for the U.S. poor; therefore they are not a promising approach for the developing-world poor. We disagree with this objection and addressed it at length in a previous post, The Case for Cash.
  • Objection 7: cash transfers are inferior to loans, because loans are more leveraged (the money lent is repaid and can be lent again) and because loans encourage productive investment. We discussed these issues in a post entitled Cash Transfers vs. Microloans.

A final objection to our recommendation of GiveDirectly is along the lines of, “Even if GiveDirectly has important advantages relative to other groups you’ve looked at, it just doesn’t pass the smell test that giving money directly to the poor is the 2nd-best way to help them. It seems like an overly simple solution; there must be something (other than bednets) that’s better.”

In some sense we agree with this: we believe there is probably some giving opportunity out there that beats all of our current top charities, and we’re looking actively for it via GiveWell Labs. Given the information we have and the approach we’ve taken today, however – looking for interventions that have strong evidence behind them and concrete room for more funding (taking into account that some of the best-proven interventions have already attracted the funding needed for straightforward rollouts) – we think it’s fairly clear that GiveDirectly’s work makes the short list.

We’ve frankly been puzzled by the amount of pushback we’ve received on GiveDirectly, relative to SCI, since the evidence on deworming looks no better than the evidence on cash transfers and since we’ve voiced what we see as more serious concerns about SCI. We’ve seen a level of skepticism applied to evidence on cash transfers that we haven’t seen applied to anything else we’ve written – which is largely a good thing (we want skepticism applied to our work), but also raises the question of whether there are deeper-seated, more intuitive objections to GiveDirectly than what’s been explicitly voiced. One guess we’ve made is that to many, what’s exciting about GiveWell is the idea of using extraordinary analysis to produce extraordinary results. People expect “the best option of all” to look more like “saving lives for absurdly low amounts of money” than like “getting money directly to the poor and letting them spend it as they will.”

Our response to this line of thinking is that the challenges of analyzing and solving problems half a world away, at scale, are real and significant – not so significant that we should drop all attempts to do better than cash transfers, but significant enough that we shouldn’t assume we’ll see much better options than cash transfers either. Having looked far and wide for underfunded yet evidence-backed interventions, we’ve concluded that having a high enough level of technocratic knowledge to do “better than cash” isn’t impossible, but it’s extremely difficult. The bar is high, and we’ve only found one charity that (not overwhelmingly) clears it. And to us, doing extraordinary analysis means being willing to embrace that result, as many less informed donors (who end up taking charities’ bold claims at face value) will not.

With that said, we also don’t think cash transfers should be seen as either an “easy” or an “unexciting” intervention. The difference between wealthy developed-world citizens and the world’s poorest people is massive, and I find it continually stunning how high a percentage of someone’s income I can provide by giving a small percentage of my own. To me, being able to send my dollars directly to the world’s poorest people, living half a world away – with only ~10% diverted to costs along the way – is an astonishing opportunity.

Empowerment and catastrophic risk

(updated on: ) | by Holden

In previous posts, I have:

  • Laid out the view that in general, further economic development and general human empowerment are likely to be substantially net positive, and are likely to lead to improvement on many dimensions in unexpected ways.
  • Listed possible global catastrophic risks that provide a potential counterpoint to this view, while also noting “global upside possibilities” in which progress could lead to a future that is far brighter than the present.

This post attempts to lay out my reasons for thinking that speeding the pace of global development and empowerment should be thought of as increasing humanity’s odds of an extremely bright future, relative to its odds of a future that is worse than the present. Note that

  • I focus here on slightly to moderately speeding or slowing the pace of global development and empowerment relative to what it is today; this takes for granted that we can expect to see substantial development and empowerment in our future, and simply asks whether it is desirable that this development/empowerment happen more quickly or more slowly.
  • I focus on the odds of an extremely bright future relative to the odds of a future that is worse than the present. This means that I’m not only considering the contribution of empowerment and development to catastrophic risk; I’m also considering their contribution to “global upside possibilities.”

1. Some catastrophic risks seem clearly reduced, and not exacerbated, by technological/economic progress. These include “non-anthropogenic” risks, such as asteroids, supervolcanoes, and non-engineered pandemics. Development may give us better tools for anticipating and responding to these risks, and is unlikely to make them worse. In addition, risks like #4 and #5 from the previous post on this topic – which involve risks of slowing growth due to shortage of a particular resource, or a slowdown in innovation – seem clearly mitigated by a faster pace of development.

2. Even for the catastrophic risks that seem exacerbated by development, I believe that faster development is likely safer than slower development (or, at worst, the net effect is highly ambiguous). This belief is based on the previously articulated concept of “global upside possibilities” – the belief that sufficient development may make the world not only better, but less at risk for major disruption by global catastrophe. If one accepts this view, it follows that faster overall development would mean less time between (a) the emergence of a given danger and (b) other developments that dramatically reduce risks. For example, faster development may bring the day closer when a highly dangerous synthetic pandemic can be designed, but it will also bring the day closer when we have the technologies and resources to manage such a risk (as well as potentially speeding the improvement of decision-making abilities and mental health worldwide, improving the capabilities of those who would mitigate such a risk and reducing the number of people who would contribute to it). Likewise, faster development may lead to higher carbon emissions, but is also likely to lead to better progress on alternative energy sources, more resources for adaptation mechanisms (much of the impact of climate change depends on these resources), and generally an environment more favorable to investing in climate change prevention.

There are certainly limitations to this reasoning. For one thing, it addresses “general” economic/technological development; the point remains that empowering people and developing technologies that are particularly likely to exacerbate risks can increase net risk, and that for any given risk there are particular kinds of growth that are more and less problematic in terms of that risk. (For example, the ideal scenario for dealing with climate change is one in which we see strong growth but also reduce carbon emissions.)

In addition, if there is a particular risk that has been clearly identified before it is yet technologically possible, and there is a promising plan for averting such a risk, it could be safer to experience slower development while the promising plan is executed. However, I know of no compelling examples of such dynamics today. (And in general, it is likely to be much easier to design a plan for responding to a risk when the risk is real and concrete rather than hypothetical.)

3. I believe that a large proportion of the risk of global catastrophe comes from the category of “risks that remain unarticulated and unimagined.” I don’t believe the list we made previously – or any list that can be constructed with today’s available information – is close to comprehensive: I expect that many of the most threatening risks are simply outside what we are able to anticipate today.

I would guess that some such risks become nearer as economic/technological development progresses, while some do not. But in all cases, I believe that economic/technological development is likely to improve our resources for anticipating, preventing and adapting to global catastrophes, and that for the reasons articulated above, faster development is more likely to reduce the lag between the emergence of risks and responses to them (including “global upside possibilities” that dramatically reduce risks).

4. A key part of my view is the belief that there are few outstanding cases in which it is clear that very particular actions need to be taken to avert particular risks. If there were a more compelling set of cases in which the right course of action were known, I would be more likely to believe that “slowing development until the right course of action can play out reduces risks, and generically speeding development increases them.” But as it is, I don’t see such clear-cut cases. The cases in which the necessary actions are clearest to me are those of asteroids (which I think is a clear-cut case in which development reduces risks) and climate change (which I see as highly ambiguous regarding the question of whether faster development is desirable, as discussed above). Thus, I don’t see a strong case for safety benefits to slower development.

I remain highly open to the possibility that particular risks represent excellent giving opportunities, and that focusing on them may do more good than simply focusing on increasing development and empowerment. But I am not aware of what I consider a strong case for believing that development in general increases the odds of a badly disrupted future relative to an extremely bright one, and I believe there are strong reasons to believe that development improves our prospects on net.