The Nonlinear Library EA - An Introduction to the CRAFT Sequence by Bob Fischer
Jul 8, 2024
06:38
Welcome 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: An Introduction to the CRAFT Sequence, published by Bob Fischer on July 8, 2024 on The Effective Altruism Forum.
This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools Sequence (the CRAFT Sequence). After a brief statement of the problems that CRAFT aims to address, we provide an overview of what it includes.
Building Giving Portfolios
Some people think that you should go all-in on particular giving opportunities. Some people think that you should diversify your giving portfolio. What assumptions and circumstances favor going all-in? What assumptions and circumstances favor diversification? And either way, what should your resources support?
Rethink Priorities' recent Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model (CCM) can help us rank interventions within certain cause areas. It can also help us rank options based on a handful of key decision theories. However, the CCM isn't designed to produce giving portfolios per se. The CCM can help us compare interventions with respect to their expected value or risk-adjusted value.
But it was never intended to answer the question: "How should I split a certain amount of money given what matters to me?" We need other tools for that purpose.
The CRAFT Sequence introduces beta versions of two such tools: a risk-based portfolio builder, where the key uncertainties concern cost curves and decision theories, and a moral-parliament-based portfolio builder, which allows for the modeling of both normative and metanormative uncertainty. The Sequence's primary goal is to take some first steps toward more principled and transparent ways of constructing giving portfolios.
Our tools make debates about worldviews more tractable by illustrating how assumptions about cost curves, attitudes toward risk, and credences in moral theories can influence allocation decisions.
These tools are limited in ways you would expect. Their specific recommendations are only as good as their highly uncertain inputs; they assume that you're acting in isolation even though others' allocations can be relevant to what's optimal for you; they sometimes sacrifice granularity for computational efficiency; and so on.
Still, the process of operationalizing and implementing proposals is instructive: it makes the choice points clear, it automates relevant calculations, it makes optimization possible, and it paves the way for future research. These tools therefore offer significant improvements over commonly used BOTECs.
What's to Come
In the coming sequence, we will introduce and comment on two tools for constructing portfolios: one focused on cost-effectiveness under various attitudes toward risk and a second that uses a moral parliament to allocate resources under metanormative uncertainty.
The second post introduces the Portfolio Builder Tool that allows you to build a giving portfolio based on (a) the amount of money you want to give, (b) your attitudes toward risk, and (c) some assumptions about the features of the interventions you're considering. The third and fourth posts explore two risk attitudes that this tool incorporates.
The third considers challenges to caring about making a difference; the fourth considers the common practice of "rounding down" low probabilities, which is one way of implementing an aversion to poorly justified probabilities.
Of course, people don't simply have different attitudes toward risk; they also give some credence to a range of different moral views. So, the fifth post introduces our Moral Parliament Tool, which allows users to consider the impact of moral uncertainty in addition to various risk attitudes. This tool implements a moral parliament and several voting procedures for adjudicating disagreements among the delegates.
And, like the first tool, the associated documentation explores the philosophic...
This post introduces Rethink Priorities' Charitable Resource Allocation Frameworks and Tools Sequence (the CRAFT Sequence). After a brief statement of the problems that CRAFT aims to address, we provide an overview of what it includes.
Building Giving Portfolios
Some people think that you should go all-in on particular giving opportunities. Some people think that you should diversify your giving portfolio. What assumptions and circumstances favor going all-in? What assumptions and circumstances favor diversification? And either way, what should your resources support?
Rethink Priorities' recent Cross-Cause Cost-Effectiveness Model (CCM) can help us rank interventions within certain cause areas. It can also help us rank options based on a handful of key decision theories. However, the CCM isn't designed to produce giving portfolios per se. The CCM can help us compare interventions with respect to their expected value or risk-adjusted value.
But it was never intended to answer the question: "How should I split a certain amount of money given what matters to me?" We need other tools for that purpose.
The CRAFT Sequence introduces beta versions of two such tools: a risk-based portfolio builder, where the key uncertainties concern cost curves and decision theories, and a moral-parliament-based portfolio builder, which allows for the modeling of both normative and metanormative uncertainty. The Sequence's primary goal is to take some first steps toward more principled and transparent ways of constructing giving portfolios.
Our tools make debates about worldviews more tractable by illustrating how assumptions about cost curves, attitudes toward risk, and credences in moral theories can influence allocation decisions.
These tools are limited in ways you would expect. Their specific recommendations are only as good as their highly uncertain inputs; they assume that you're acting in isolation even though others' allocations can be relevant to what's optimal for you; they sometimes sacrifice granularity for computational efficiency; and so on.
Still, the process of operationalizing and implementing proposals is instructive: it makes the choice points clear, it automates relevant calculations, it makes optimization possible, and it paves the way for future research. These tools therefore offer significant improvements over commonly used BOTECs.
What's to Come
In the coming sequence, we will introduce and comment on two tools for constructing portfolios: one focused on cost-effectiveness under various attitudes toward risk and a second that uses a moral parliament to allocate resources under metanormative uncertainty.
The second post introduces the Portfolio Builder Tool that allows you to build a giving portfolio based on (a) the amount of money you want to give, (b) your attitudes toward risk, and (c) some assumptions about the features of the interventions you're considering. The third and fourth posts explore two risk attitudes that this tool incorporates.
The third considers challenges to caring about making a difference; the fourth considers the common practice of "rounding down" low probabilities, which is one way of implementing an aversion to poorly justified probabilities.
Of course, people don't simply have different attitudes toward risk; they also give some credence to a range of different moral views. So, the fifth post introduces our Moral Parliament Tool, which allows users to consider the impact of moral uncertainty in addition to various risk attitudes. This tool implements a moral parliament and several voting procedures for adjudicating disagreements among the delegates.
And, like the first tool, the associated documentation explores the philosophic...