Zach Stein-Perlman's Shortform

Zach Stein-Perlman

Zach Stein-Perlman's Shortform — LessWrong

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Something I was wrong about: credit assignment.

I used to think: I‘m an altruist; it doesn’t matter whether I get credit for my contributions. Now I think getting credit is often important. In some contexts, when you do a good thing, a lot of the value comes indirectly via you getting empowered. And if others systematically steal your credit or block you from taking credit, you should be scared of the prospect that (1) you’re giving them power which they will use poorly or (2) you become dependent on them — if you’d gotten credit, then you’d be empowered and people would listen to you, but since they took credit, you’re stuck only able to exert influence by advising them, and they can stop listening to you.

There’s often reasonable-sounding arguments that it’s better if someone else takes credit, but you should (1) be suspicious and (2) just pay some costs to preserve proper credit assignment.

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1Noah Birnbaum7mo

Credit also matters because it helps us identify which interventions actually produce good outcomes. For example, understanding whether I or 80,000 Hours was responsible for someone in my EA group securing a high-impact job informs where we should allocate resources to most effectively place more people in such roles.

8kave7mo

I claim that similarly: non-profit funding norms are bad. In non-profit land, funding is cost-based. As long as you're above some bar, you get funding to carry out your activities. No more, no matter how cost-effective you are. This reduces the power of the people doing good object-level work, and increases the power of the funder. OP's point (1) and (2) both seem like things that happen with funders! To be clear, this dynamic lacks the epistemic distortion of inappropriate credit assignment. And funders ultimately get to use their money how they want. But I think non-profit workers underrate the impact of their diminished empowerment. And that impacts their ability to do good by their lights!

Zach Stein-Perlman7mo20

I agree in part. But redistributing money/power from funders to workers is good for the world only insofar as the workers are better at turning money/power into goodness-for-the-world than the funders. Is that true for the AI safety ecosystem? There's certainly some cases where it's true, e.g. your principle would have produced good results in the case of Lightcone, but I think it's mostly false; I think the funders are better at turning money into goodness than almost all of the workers. (Plus insofar as the workers aren't altruists they'll waste money on consumption.)

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