Hi All,

I wanted to make a post about this but I just signed up so unfortunately do not have the reputation needed yet. So if anyone finds this worthy enough for a post, you are welcome to make one.

In short I think it would be beneficial for EA to get its own Stack Exchange and we can make this happen by casting a vote on the existing proposal:

https://area51.stackexchange.com/proposals/109145/effective-altruism

The longer argument for this:

If you have done anything related to programming you are probably familiar with stack exchange. It is a community website where peers can answer each others questions, these answers and questions can be voted on. This format might sound very familiar to this forum and reddit (which also has a quality EA page) However I think it would be valuable for EA to get its own stack exchange page for the following reasons:

• It has a format that makes it easy to ask short questions and preserves common general questions (this forum and reddit seem more suited for lengthy discussions)
• Older questions are easily found on Stack exchange, also search engines list them quiet well
• Stack exchange has a huge community, EA could get some free promotion by having its own stack exchange page
• EA organisation sites have good FAQ's about general things for newcomers but imo there is nothing compared to crowd sourced FAQ for which stack exchange has the ideal format

I hope you found this convincing and we will soon give birth to the EA Stack Exchange page.

Any thoughts on individual-level political de-polarization in the United States as a cause area? It seems important, because a functional US government helps with a lot of things, including x-risk. I don't know whether there are tractable/neglected approaches in the space. It seems possible that interventions on individuals that are intended to reduce polarization and promote understanding of other perspectives, as opposed to pushing a particular viewpoint or trying to lobby politicians, could be neglected. http://web.stanford.edu/~dbroock/published%20paper%20PDFs/broockman_kalla_transphobia_canvassing_experiment.pdf seems like a useful study in this area (it seems possible that this approach could be used for issues on the other side of the political spectrum)

I have found it helpful in talking about donating large percentages of salary to be able to point out how many people do similar amounts of sacrifice. One comparison that has been made was with being vegetarian. But this is hard to compare and still only a few percent of people. More common is people taking a 10% pay cut for positive impact of their job, or donating 10% of their free time (which I am saying is roughly 40 hours per week if one has a full-time job (comments here)). I tried to get some rough estimates of the rates of these behaviors, but has anyone else done it more rigorously or would like to do it?

One last one.

I'm writing more on my blog about my approach to intelligence augmentation

I'll be coding and thinking about how to judge it's impact this week (a lot of it depends on things like hard vs soft takeoff, possibilities of singletons and other crucial considerations). I'm also up for spending a few hours helping people with IA or autonomy based EA work, if anyone needs it?

I've been reading Superforecasting and my take away is that to have good predictions at the world you need to have a multiplicity of view points and quantify and breakdown the estimates fermi-style.

So my question is, has there been any collective attempts at model building for prediction purposes? Try and get all the hedgehogs together with their big ideas and synthesize them to form a collective fox-y model?

I know there are prediction markets, but you don't know what information that a price has synthesized so it is hard to bet on them, if you only have a small bit of information and do not think you know better than the market as a whole.

It would seem that if we could share a pool of predictive power between us we could make better decisions about how to intervene in the world.

An idea i've had for a while: Making an Effective Altruism/DGB board game might might be an high impact project.

The reasons for why that would be are rough, but sensible i think.

1: Games can teach mindsets and viewpoints of the world that other media cannot, and since much of EA is counterintuitive, a game can be a great learning tool.

2: It can serve the same purpose as an documentary (aka: an EA awareness tool)

3: could be fun to whip out at EA hangouts and play with people new to EA ; related to 1st point.

4: Board games are having an golden age right now, with more people buying them then ever, and marketing/releasing a board game is radically cheaper then in the past, as far as i can tell.

what are some reasons not to pursue this project?

Well...

1: making a game takes long time, and...

2: Terrible career capital (as far as i can tell)

So unless you have much game design experience, or can persuade a fellow game designer to do it, it's very much not worth your time. 80 000 hours and CEA may be able to do something with this project, but otherwise im drawing a blank.

I have made a rough sketch of how a game like this would work, but it's not very good because i am not a game designer.

Thoughts?

Drawdown a book on possible climate change solutions seems EA relevant. It is interesting that it only allows peer reviewed data/models in it and systematically surveys all the solutions they could find.

Hello,

I would love some feedback on what I'm calling an "EA Idea Sounding Board"

I'm thinking of a call-in show and/or a message board, where EA's suggest ideas to someone with experience in the EA landscape, perhaps an advisor at 80,000 Hours. It might go something like this:

An 80,000 Hours advisor takes calls from EA's who essentially pitch their ideas for anything EA related: an idea for a donation drive, for a new cause area, for a startup. The advisor hears out the idea and reframes and refines it to show both how it is promising and in what ways it seems to miss the mark. At the end, they work an assessment and plan. The overall assessment might fall into categories, like: -"Back to the Drawing Board" (Rethink/research these major limitations: ) -"Worth Pursuing" (You're onto something here, develop these parts: _) -"Ready for Prime Time" (Well researched/planned, concrete next steps: _)

These calls could be recorded with the option to be edited and distributed as a podcast episode. I see lots of potential value:

• Showcasing good ideas
• Demonstrate rationality in progress
• Highlight limitations of cognitive biases
• Demonstrate the general principles/values of EA
• Offer updates on latest EA topics
• Enhance networking.

Not every call would be broadcast, only the very best ones. Part of the incentive for developing a good idea is to see if you can generate an interesting enough discussion to get published. However, maybe the best part is that even weak ideas might be very valuable to publish because they would demonstrate loose thinking and be good examples of constructive criticism.

Alternatively, this could be distributed on a message board or forum of some kind. Perhaps after the discussion with the 80,000 Hours advisor, the person pitching the idea would write up a summary of the dialog, highlighting the original idea, the general principles, the cognitive biases or weak elements, the strengths of the idea, and the final assessment. This summary could be posted for the community to review. To streamline this, a template could be created ahead of time which forms the basis of the idea discussion. After the discussion, the template is edited to reflect the content of the discussion and made ready for posting. Certain tags could be added, such as a request for someone to weigh in if they know of research in this area, or someone to fund the idea. The 80,000 Hours advisor could affix an overall rating of how promising they think this idea is and what needs to be done to make it more promising.

Thanks!

Rough summary % of US population

Giving 10%+: Time: 7%; Pay cut: 20%; Donate: 6%

Giving 20%+: Time: 2%; Pay cut: 10%; Donate: 0.6%

This is based on 40 hours per week free time. The take away (that I believe is robust despite uncertainty explained below) is that people are much more willing to take a big pay cut than to donate a similar percent of money. So if we could get people over the psychological barrier, we might be able to convince 20% of people to be EAs.

Furthermore, at least in the US, donating 10% of your pretax (adjusted gross income) is a smaller economic hit than taking a 10% pay cut because not all income is taxed. This would mean even more than 20% of people take a pay cut that is equivalent to donating 10%.

Volunteering source: bins are not perfect.

Pay cut source, government employment source, nonprofit employment source. Of course there can be other differences in employment like job security, benefits, and hours. However, this is not accounting for people who choose a lower paying field for the impact, so it gives some idea.

Giving source: percentages are for religious giving, which is ~half of giving in US, so I doubled the percentages to get the people giving that amount to any charity: rough.

I'm interested in quantifying the impact of blockchain and cryptocurrency from a ITN perspective. My instinct is that the technology could be powerful from a "root cause incentive" perspective, from a "breaking game theory" perspective, and from a "change how money works" perspective. I'll have a more full post about this soon, but here's some of my initial thoughts on the subject:

1. https://medium.com/@RhysLindmark/creating-a-humanist-blockchain-future-2-effective-altruism-blockchain-833a260724ee
2. https://medium.com/@RhysLindmark/10-doing-good-together-coordinating-the-effective-altruist-community-with-blockchain-188c4b7aa4b0

I'd be especially interested in hearing from people who think blockchain/crypto should NOT be a focus of the EA community! (e.g. It's clearly not neglected!)

I've started blogging regularly. Today I asked whether the push for AI safety needs more of a public movement behind it in light of the letter on AI weapons from Elon Musk and others. Read it and let me know what your thoughts are, as I may act on your answers!

What do you think about reducing transport cost by increasing passenger density as a cause area? Reducing transport cost seems to be very important for the economy, to facilitate business, migration, tourism, etc.. For example, international tourism is a significant industry of many poor countries. (http://step.unwto.org/content/tourism-and-poverty-alleviation-1) Although increasing passenger density may make flights less safe, by an economy class syndrome or slower evacuation, etc., I think lower flight cost could actually reduce transport death as air is the safest way to travel by micromort per passenger-kilometer, and many people choose more dangerous methods of travel (car, bus, train, ship) because of the cost (http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/risks_of_travel.htm). Of course, the payload of any airplane is limited, so there may be limitations on the density of passengers. To reduce overall density, it is possible to sell less dense seats as well. (e.g. standing seat, supereconomy, economy, premium economy, partial recline business, full recline business, first, etc..) Also, to reduce payload, it is possible to not to allow check-in baggage and even making a cabin in the lower deck. Although my focus here is airplanes, this could be applied to bus, train, ship, etc. as well.

I would like to suggest several ways to increase passenger density: 1) Reducing seat pitch: It is possible to reduce seat pitch to as short as 28 inches. (https://www.seatguru.com/charts/shorthaul_economy.php) 2) Standing seat: Although this is similar to 1) it is much more radical. It is possible to reduce seat pitch even more by adopting standing seats, although regulations might not allow this. 3) Reducing seat width: It is possible to reduce seat width to as narrow as 16 inches. (ibid.) It is possible to make 13 seats abreast configuration on A380 main deck. (248-inch width of the main deck (http://www.airliners.net/forum/viewtopic.php?t=410157), 16 inches per seat, 20 inches per aisle.) 4) Reducing the number of the aisle of wide-body aircraft to one: This is not feasible right now due to regulations such as 14 CFR 25.817 (https://www.law.cornell.edu/cfr/text/14/25.817), which limits the number of seats abreast to 6 in single-aisle aircraft. 5) Lower deck cabin: Lower decks (cargo deck) of airplanes are almost as big as the passenger deck or in case of A380, almost as big as the upper deck. Some planes have crew rest or lavatory at lower deck. (see, e.g., http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/Who-needs-windows-The-plane-where-passengers-sit-in-hold/)

(re-post from EA Entrepreneurship FB group)

I've so far not seen it, but is anyone taking a broader axiological approach to AI alignment rather than a decision theory specific approach? Obviously the decision theory approach is a more bounded problem that is likely easier to solve since it is a special case of dealing with processes we can apply decision theory to, but I wonder if we might not gain insights and better intuitions from studying more general cases.

thanks

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