Pinned Posts
Recent Discussion
In a recent comment, Ben Todd of 80,000 Hours wrote about his desire to see more EA entrepreneurs who can scale their charities to spend larger amounts of money:
I'm especially excited about finding people who could run $100m+ per year 'megaprojects', as opposed to more non-profits in the $1-$10m per year range, though I agree this might require building a bigger pipeline of smaller projects.
He later tweeted
It's striking that the projects that were biggest in pre-2015 (OP, GiveWell, MIRI, CEA, 80k, FHI) are still among the biggest today, when additional resources should make new types of project possible.
It is striking and surprising that these are still some of the largest projects in the EA community. However, it's not surprising that these types of projects aren't spending $100...
Summary
It seems unlikely that green growth alone (or absolute decoupling, measures of efficiency) will be sufficient to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in time [1]. In order to not spend the world’s carbon budget in the coming decade(s), it seems we will also need to change our behavior (measures of sufficiency). However, it is very difficult for political parties to advocate such measures - and to properly inform the general public - out of a fear of electoral loss. Yet the longer we wait with effective GHG emission reductions, the more impactful such measures will need to be. The solution this text proposes is an (online-first) preferendum, in which a government or parliament polls the broad population about which of a set of additional measures, compiled ideally...
I think where we disagree is that you seem to accept warming of considerably more than 2°C, where I refuse to accept such a scenario, and look for ways to avoid it.
Clearly in order to reach net zero emissions at some point, we need technological innovation and market forces. But if we want to stay well below 2°, preferably at 1,5°, waiting for those won't cut it: during the coming decade(s), we would spend all of our remaining carbon budget to stay within those boundaries with some degree of certainty.
In order to sufficiently reduce our emissions the comi... (read more)
Summary
- The Community Building Grants (CBG) programme will be narrowing its scope to support groups in certain key locations and universities.
- Harri Besceli, who has been running the programme since 2018, is stepping down from the CBG manager role, so we will be hiring a new programme manager. Individuals interested in the role can apply here.
- The CBG programme has opened applications for certain universities (see list below).
- The CBG Programme plans to run hiring rounds in select city / national locations (see list below). The timeline for these application rounds will be announced once a new Programme Manager for the program is hired.
- The Effective Altruism Infrastructure Fund (EAIF) will start assessing applications for grants to pay for full- and part-time organisers from groups not covered by the CBG programme. The
Thanks! I need to ask a lot of clarifying questions:
When you say "This is because the type of centralized support CEA might provide and the type of skills/characteristics required of someone working full-time running a university group or a city/national professional network might look very different depending on the ultimate model.", (1) does "This" refer to the fact that you have 2 subteams working with focus locations as opposed to everyone working on all locations? (2) If so, could I reword the explanation the sentence gives to "We need to work on focu... (read more)
A new volume with essays on EA from a religious perspectives is out.
The volume is open access. The first three chapters - after Lara Buchak's foreword - provide a general take on EA from a Buddhist, Christian, and Orthodox Jewish perspective. Among the other chapters, I would particularly like to highlight Stefan Riedener’s chapter. Given the focus on extinction risks in EA, his clear and helpful analysis from a Christian (more specifically: Thomist) perspective is a very valuable contribution.
How you can help: if you know academics in the field of religion, you can point them towards the volume or to one of these chapters. If you know anyone whom I should send a physical copy, let me know.
This volume is not the final word on the intersection...
A lot has happened since I wrote about my PhD in August. Seems like a reflection is in order!
In short, I have decided to suspend my PhD. For the next year I will be working as a contractor for the Open Philanthropy Project, helping them develop better models of how transformative AI might result in economic growth loops. If this goes well, I plan to transition into doing more contractor work for EA-aligned organizations.
But before we get to the juicy details, more on these last few months.
- Between September and October I did a PhD secondment in Maastricht University. I had a fantastic time and met some great people. Having an office and being surrounded by colleagues while working made a huge difference to my happiness and productivity.
During
Congratulations on the new position, it sounds really exciting!
Content warning: gambling is addictive and generally loses money. Please don't make any bets with negative expected value.
tl;dr: New York State recently legalized online sports gambling, so casinos are offering large incentives for signing up on their websites. I got about $4,400 out of this (you can probably do better; see below) and will be donating it to GiveWell. You must be located in New York or another eligible state while signing up and making the bets.
How to exploit this
There are various casinos, sportsbooks, and other gambling establishments located in New York State. Online sports gambling was legalized there in January 2022, so they are giving out introductory offers where they will match your deposits or give you free bets when you sign up. Basically, you can...
My understanding is that wagering requirements that severely reduce the EV of promotional offers (but still keeping it positive in some cases) are standard in the industry. That said, maybe the situation in NY is exceptional now.
Summary: Creating the right incentive structures in science could make science more fluid, efficient, and painless. Indeed, there seem to be multiple reasons why people complain about how science is done now. In this post, I analyze some of the problems science has, and give some hints at ideas that could improve the situation. The aim of this post is to suggest science policy as a possible research area for EAs where it might be possible to do progress that results in better science.
Introduction
Science is one of the key enablers of progress in our world. Yet it seems to me that there are many ways it could be improved. It seems to me from anecdotal evidence that most scientists are in fact not happy about the incentive...
Thanks for this! I've been thinking quite a bit about this (see some previous posts) and there is a bit of an emerging EA/metascience community, would be happy to chat if you're interested!
Some specific comments:
In consequence, a possible solution is some kind of coordinated action by scientists (or universities) to decline being referees for high-fee journals.
Could you elaborate the change in the system you envision as a result of something like this? My current thinking (but very open to being convinced otherwise) is that lower fees to access publication... (read more)
How does Replaceability applies to overcrowded academic areas that have an oversupply of PhDs slaving away in postdocs never to find a permanent job? This glut of PhDs must mean the actual impact of me joining a field like Particle Physics would be very low. Is that correct?
How is that different to one of the recommended career paths by 80000 Hours, Biomedical Research, which is also competitive, but is marked as high impact?
For context, I must mention that Biomedical Research seem to tackle more 'solvable' problems while Theoretical Physics has been mostly stagnated since the standard model (little progress has been made in several decades). For example, a few scientists predicted the Higgs boson within a short time of each other, Higgs was merely the first to...
tl;dr: We should value large expected impact[1] rather than large inputs, but should get especially excited about megaprojects anyway because they're a useful tool we're now unlocking.
tl;dr 2: It previously made sense for EAs to be especially excited about projects with very efficient expected impact (in terms of dollars and labour required). Now that we have more resources, we should probably be especially excited about projects with huge expected impact (especially but not only if they're very efficient). Those projects will often be megaprojects. But we should remember that really we're excited about capacity to achieve lots of impacts, not capacity to absorb lots of inputs.
We should be excited about the blue and green circles, including but not limited to their overlaps with the orange circle. We should not...
I completely agree with everything you said (and my previous comment was trying to convey a part of this, admittedly in much less transparent way).
I'd be keen to know how this helps.
Investors and researchers who don't believe in your stances or leadership can probably exit and form new companies, and if they do believe, you don't necessarily need to buy shares to get them to listen. Capital isn't a major constraint as far as I can see. But I'm an outsider to this so I'd be keen to know more.
P.S. Even within the EA community there's disagreement on safety/capabilities tradeoffs, or what safety work actually works. I wonder how you'll pick good leadership for this that all of the EA community is comfortable with.