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This post is co-authored with Ben Garfinkel. It is cross-posted from the CEA blog. A PDF version can be found here.
Summary: Some strategic decisions available to the effective altruism m...
Curated and popular this week
Disclaimer: Although I work on the Groups Team at CEA, I鈥檓 writing this in a personal capacity, and this post does not constitute an endorsement by CEA.聽
Agency - the realisation that you really can just do things.
TL;DR
Biosecurity needs people (of any background) who are agentic and have a high execution velocity and track record....
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Far be it for me to rain on the parade of someone who wants to do good with their windfall -- I do admire that -- but I downvoted this post because it does not have any direct EA relevance.
Seems relevant if someone wants to reach out & see if Missler is aware of / interested in EA.
That's what I expected to see when I clicked on the title: an actionable item. This would have been relevant if the be millionaire expressed interest in being contacted by strangers. However, it does not seem like that's the case, so it's not useful for many EAs to spend their time reading it.
A more proactive stance seems appropriate here. Missler didn't say "please don't contact me," and has been open about his win on social media, so inquiries to see if he's aware of EA seem worth it. (It takes about 3 minutes to find & message them on facebook; payoff is a small chance of creating another value-aligned multimillionaire funder.)
Isn't this an example of the unilateralist's curse? If every EA independently decides whether to slide into his DMs, the people who decide to do so will be those who are overconfident in their persuasion abilities.
The risk here is that someone will give him a negative first impression of EA. People don't change their minds nearly as much as they should, so first impressions matter a lot. Any below-99th-percentile attempt to reach out to multimillionaires could have very negative expected utility.
That said, I'm not sure this argument is correct, so I'd appreciate criticism.
You might as well randomly go through the list of multimillionaires/billionaires and cold-call them. Maybe not the worst idea, but there's nothing in particular to suggest this guy would be special.
That seems like not a bad idea, though probably not very tractable.
A couple things stand out here as special: