In addition to the main event of EAGxVirtual 2020 on June 13th and 14th, there will be another chance to speak up, present your thoughts, discuss your paper, raise a question, host a discussion…
If you think there was anything missing during the first weekend, we would love for you to join the EAGxVirtual Unconference on Saturday, June 20th. The EAGxVirtual team will provide the schedule and tech support, and will help spread the word, but we’ll need you to come up with the actual content.
This event is especially meant for people who haven’t had a chance to discuss their ideas or research with a broader audience before, or who want to get feedback on novel ideas. Your presentation could be pure theory, or a concrete proposal for a project or a startup.
Currently, we plan to have two session blocks:
- Early sessions: 8 x 30 min. sessions from 10 AM till 12 PM GMT+2
- Late sessions: 8 x 30 min. sessions from 7 PM till 9 PM GMT+2
Each session will last 30 minutes, and there will be 2 sessions running in parallel. Each session comprises a 15 min. talk and a 15 min. Q&A.
If you’d like to run a session, please post your proposal as a comment below, include any relevant links, and let us know whether you would prefer to be part of the early or the late sessions. The 8 pitches that receive the most votes (for the early and the late sessions respectively) by 10am CET on Monday, June 15th will be picked.
If you're not planning to present something yourself but know someone who should, please share this post with them!
Either way, we would love for you to join the Unconference and be part of the discussion. Once the schedule is finalized, we’ll post it to the Forum, the Facebook event, and the EAGxVirtual 2020 website. This event is open to everyone.
UPDATE (June 19):
We are excited to announce the speakers for the EAGxVirtual Unconference (please note that we put together the schedule based on the number of votes and the speakers’ availability to give a talk).
If you were an attendee of EAGxVirtual 2020 you will also find the sessions in the official schedule of the conference on Grip: https://frame.grip.events/EAGxVirtual2020 (Time zone: GMT+2)
You can also add each session from our shared Google calendar.
We look forward to seeing you there!
UPDATE (July 6):
(Most) speakers have kindly given their permission to add their talks to this public Youtube playlist: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLbGfSsJMiISWP3SEBSxRKIdoMYIqUsqIn
You can find the crowdsourced notes for all the sessions (incl. Q&A) here: https://tinyurl.com/y8u5768w
*Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain*
Recall that while some distributions (e.g. the size of the leaves of a tree) follow a Gaussian bell-shaped pattern, many others (e.g. avalanches, size of asteroids, etc.) follow a long-tail distribution. Long-tail distributions have the general property that a large fraction of the volume is accounted for by a tiny percent of instances (e.g. 80% of the snow that falls from the mountain will be the result of the top 20% largest avalanches).
Keeping long-tails in mind: based on previous research we have conducted at the Qualia Research Institute we have arrived at the tentative conclusion that the intensity of pleasure and pain follows a long-tail distribution. Why?
First, neural activity on patches of neural tissue follow log-normal distributions (an instance of a long-tail distribution).
Second, the extremes of pleasure and pain are so intense that they cannot conceivably be just the extremes of a normal distribution. This includes, on the positive end: Jhana meditation, 5-MeO-DMT peak experiences, and temporal lobe epilepsy (Dostoevsky famously saying he'd trade 10 years of his life for just a few moments of his good epileptic experience... (read more)
Hi Aidan!
Thank you ^_^
We are collaborating with John Hopkins and Stanford researchers on a couple of studies involving the analysis of neuroimaging data of high-valence states of consciousness. Additionally, we are currently preparing two key publications for peer-reviewed journals on our core research areas.
Off the top of my head, some well-known researchers and intellectuals that are very positive about our work include: Robin Carhart-Harris, Scott Alexander, David Pearce, Steven Lehar, Daniel Ingram, etc. (e.g. Scott acknowledged that QRI put together the paradigms that contributed to Friston's integrative model of how psychedelics work before his research was published). Our track record so far has been to foreshadow by several years in advance key discoveries later proposed and accepted in mainstream academia. Given our current research findings, I expect this to continue in the years to follow.
Cheers! :)
EAs in Politics and Gov: A Case Study
Who I Am
I was the Senior Campus Outreach Director for the Humane League for 1.5 years, then went on to become the Animal Welfare Liaison for the Office of the Mayor of New York City. I now serve as the Deputy Strategist for the Brooklyn Borough President in NYC, advancing plant-forward initiatives, such as Meatless Mondays and the banning of processed meat.
Summary
Political and governmental involvement seems to be relatively neglected, while simultaneously, tractable, within EA. The presentation will consist of two parts: (i) an examination of effective animal advocacy within NYC government and (ii) a quick guide on how to be more politically involved.
EAs within policy and government can provide political will for electeds and governmental agencies to move on issues they otherwise wouldn’t move on. They also can have more power than outsiders to prevent poor high-level decisions and advocate for positive high-level decisions. These principles can apply to the local, state, and federal level. Working within politics/gov may also provide great career capital, as well as connections.
This presentation will speak about my own work related to animal welfare in NYC in these contexts, and provide a jumping off point for those interested in applying EA to politics and government.
Time Slot
Late session please!
Discussing EA with Non-EA People | External Movement-Building
Premise
When I first started calling myself an Effective Altruist, it was hard to talk about EA to other people. If it came up, I would find myself backed into a corner, ultimately trying to defend utilitarianism to someone who didn’t want to be convinced. These conversations didn’t feel productive. So for a while, I kept EA to myself.
Eventually I looked for carefully-worded, clear ways to explain EA concepts that are non-contentious but still retain fidelity to the heart and values of EA. I’ve learned that just because many people do not want to have long philosophical discussions, look at graphs, and listen to 3-hour podcasts, does not mean they don’t want to do a lot of good. Just like the animal rights movement has had success getting non-vegans to cut back on meat consumption, the EA movement could benefit by promoting certain concepts to people who don’t identify as EA.
Pulling from my 8 years of experience as a “highly-effective” public school educator and 2 years of experience giving and honing my talk about EA for high school and college students (on an irregular bas... (read more)
Non-hormonal birth control for men and women
YourChoice is developing non-hormonal birth control for both men and women. Nadja Mannowetz has discovered three compounds that bind to sperm and render them immobile. At first, they aim to create a topically applied gel (e.g., on demand birth control for women that would be better than a diaphragm). After that, they’d like to develop an oral product (e.g., a non-hormonal male birth control pill). Eventually, the goal is to create a safe, cheap non-hormonal birth control implant for both men and women. Such an implant would drop the error rate close to zero vs. products that involve more human discretion.
This should be a boon to humanity since it will: 1) slow population growth and reduce our toll on the environment; 2) help people better plan their lives and reproductive decisions; and 3) improve family formation (vs. 40% of births in the U.S. currently being to single parents – this has a particular effect on young boys).
This is:
Important: Few things impact a person’s life more than the decision (or not) to have a child. This is particularly true in developing countries where resources to support a child might be sc... (read more)
"Everyday EA" - A new EA podcast
Summary:
I am in the very early stages of creating a new EA podcast with the working title: Everyday EA. The podcast would be informal interviews with people in the EA community (broadly) who are not particularly well known, yet are doing valuable work, even if they aren’t yet the most successful person in their field. I’d like to use this session to get feedback on the initial idea, to talk to people who have podcasting experience, and to search for possible collaborators.
Details:
Many people in the community see the great research, writing, advocacy, and altruism of others and do not feel like they have enough to contribute so lose motivation to contribute at all. They only see the most successful people and think “I cannot achieve that”. This means that we are missing out on a large number of great minds who could help humans and animals now and in the future. I’d like to start a podcast project that promotes the voices of "everyday EAs": relatable role-models in the EA community who, while not necessarily being at the very top of their respective field, are having a meaningful impact that shoul... (read more)
Improving access to effective medication to treat cluster ("suicide") headaches
OPIS is an EA-associated think-and-do tank focused on the prevention of intense suffering as an ethical priority (https://www.preventsuffering.org/). We are addressing a few specific causes of suffering and, at a more meta level, working to promote compassionate ethics in governance.
One of our main current areas of focus is cluster headaches, a form of trigeminal autonomic cephalalgia and one of the most painful conditions known to medicine, often driving patients to suicide (https://www.preventsuffering.org/cluster-headaches/). The agony they cause is often compared to having a red hot ice pick driven though the eye into the brain. Attacks typically last one hour and repeat several times a day. Patients are often woken up several times during the night by attacks, and they go to extremes, including banging their head against the wall and punching their head, to try to distract themselves from the severe pain. About 85% of patients have episodic clusters lasting 1-3 months, occurring once or twice a year at the same time of year, during which they have daily recurrences at the frequency mention... (read more)
How financial improvements can counterfactually increase funding for EA charities by tens of thousands to millions of dollars per charity
I run Antigravity Investments, an EA social enterprise with the mission of indirectly donating millions to charity by helping charities invest more effectively. Last year, we published this EA Forum article explaining why charities should shift cash from low-interest to high-interest accounts: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YjN6cGoXxPZeqCh4Z/eas-and-ea-orgs-should-move-cash-from-low-interest-to-high.
This talk will cover new research done by Antigravity Investments on approximating opportunity costs that charities incur by not following best practices in cash management. We will cover applying our opportunity cost estimation methodology across selected EA charities as well as across a data set of over 300,000 U.S. charities.
We will also cover how our outreach strategy has fared over the past year, and perhaps most importantly, recommend concrete steps EA community members and operations/finance staff at EA organizations can take to increase funding for high-impact causes.
I am based on the West Coast and would prefer the late sessions.
German-speaking EA community
NEAD (Netzwerk für Effektiven Altruismus Deutschland) is the umbrella association for EAs in Germany. We, the organizers, are looking forward to meeting new potential members and get to know EAs from all parts of Germany. We propose a German-speaking EA community meet-up during the unconference.
NEAD is an association that was founded in October 2019. You can read up on our initial objectives in this forum post. Right now we are looking for interested people within the community to become members of NEAD and get involved in our projects.
We want to present what NEAD is doing and how you can be and become a part of our network.
We also want to give you room to exchange your experiences with the virtual conference. Lastly, we want to learn from you what you expect and want from a national-level EA network in Germany :)
We would prefer one of the early time-slots.
*Incremental Reading as a Tool for Improved Learning and Research*
What is incremental reading?
(Note, I’m talking about incremental reading as it is implemented in SuperMemo, not as in Anki’s plugin, polar, or dendro)
Summary: allows for acquiring vast amounts of information efficiently
Many people are already familiar with spaced repetition, which is a good way for memorizing things for long-term recall.
The problem with just using spaced repetition is that it makes memorizing things easy but it doesn't give you a good system for learning things before memorizing them. If you want to go through say, a hundred articles from the original sequences it would be extremely tedious to memorize the important parts in Anki, for example.
Incremental reading fixes this issue by making it easy to:
1. collect all the information you want to learn in one place (electronic material at least)
2. prioritize what you have collected (when you have limited time, prioritizing is helpful for spending time on most important material)
3. Process and break down what you've prioritized (focusing on the parts of material that actually matter)
4. retain what you've processed (with spaced ... (read more)
EAs are Underrating the Anti-slavery Cause
Around the world, tens of millions of innocent people are enslaved in sweatshops, brick kilns & brothels, on farms and fishing vessels, inside homes, and in other dire situations. The largest categories of modern-day slavery are forced labour, bonded labour (a.k.a. debt bondage), sexual slavery, and coerced marriage.
In 2016, Giving What We Can (a part of the Centre for Effective Altruism) rated this cause at 3 stars out of a possible 5 in terms of its importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Also, it rated "the best [anti-slavery] charity we can find" (The Freedom Fund) -- focussing on its work in India in particular -- as follows:
cost-effectiveness -- 3 stars (out of 5)
robustness of evidence - 3 stars
quality of implementation - 4 stars
But last September, The Freedom Fund released new data about its recent work in 3 states of India that showed an approximate 125,000-person decline in bonded labour. This decline -- relative to the (untouted) cost of it -- leads to my rough estimate that the cost of each free person who otherwise would have been in bonded labour was $80 or 71 euros.
This indicates that -- contrary to GWWC&apo... (read more)
A Mindful Approach to Tackling those Yucky Tasks You’ve Been Putting Off
For many of us, procrastination is a problem. This can take many forms, but we’ll focus on relatively simple tasks that you’ve been putting off long-term.
Epistemic status: speculative, n=1 stuff.
Yucky Tasks
Yucky tasks may be thought of several ways:
The connection to EA?
EA is not about following well-trodden paths. We’re all trying to do something different and new, and stepping out of comfort zones.
For some of us, we may be exceptionally talented or productive in some domains, but find some of the tasks elusive or hard to get a grip on.
So what happens?
Most commonly avoidance. This can go on until there’s some kind of shift: maybe we avoid something until it becomes sup... (read more)
Potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in catastrophic scenarios
My name is Juan B. García Martínez, research associate of the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). My colleagues Joseph Egbejimba, James Throup, Silvio Matassa, Joshua M. Pearce, David C. Denkenberger and I have researched the potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in global catastrophic scenarios.
As members of ALLFED we are concerned by the fact that the current global food system is critically unprepared for extreme catastrophes of non-negligible likelihood, such as supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, nuclear wars or pandemics that disrupt food trade. Instead of giving up in the face of this fact, we study potential solutions that could help in such events.
Abstract
Human civilization’s food production system is currently unprepared for catastrophes that would reduce global food production by 10% or more, such as nuclear winter, supervolcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts. Alternative foods that do not require much or any sunlight have been proposed as a more cost-effective solution than increasing food ... (read more)
Avoiding Infocalypse: How a decline in epistemic competence makes catastrophic risks inevitable — and what EA's can do about it
This would be shortened and modified version of a talk I gave at Cambridge University, at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The general public version of many of the ideas can be found in this TEDx talk that I gave in 2018 (ignore the title, not my choice).
Part 1: Framing the underlying problem
Describe what is meant by epistemic competence (the ability or desire for individuals, organizations, governments, etc. to effectively make sense of the world). Illustrate how it is declining, and how that is likely to get worse.
Part 2: Connect to catastrophic risks
Describe how lower epistemic competence makes it extremely difficult to do any sort of crucial coordination, making global coordination on catastrophic risks increasingly unlikely. In addition, lower epistemic competence makes catastrophic forcing functions more likely and individual mitigation steps less likely.
Part 3: Exploring mitigations
Discuss what can be done, and show that many of these problems are related to other better u... (read more)
Authentic Relating, Changing People's Minds, and Increasing Communication Capacity
Summary
We would like to share insights and discuss an authentic relating practise known as circling. Circling is an activity designed to create an “authentic” and “alive” atmosphere, as well as increase the participants' (and facilitators) capacity for empathy, connection, and sharing “cruxes”.
Background
A common problem around “convincing” people to adopt EA values or change their behaviors to be more EA aligned, is accessing the emotional part(s) of themselves that can make the decisions and feel good about it in a way that can permeate into their lives.
The kind of circling that we do creates an atmosphere of vulnerability, emotional openness. During these sessions participants connect to what they personally find truly important and how they want to live their lives.
A secondary effect of participating in these circling (among many), is an increased capacity for those involved to have a better experiential understanding of how people make decisions, how they choose what to share, and how vulnerable they can be.
Presentation
We would l... (read more)
A Metamodern Approach to "Leveling-up" Humanity
ThinkBetter was founded by five EAs in Toronto with the mission of creating a scalable rationality training program, and the goal of materially raising the global sanity waterline. Through a series of rapid-prototyping and OODA loops, we ended up 'transcending and including' our initial curriculum and strategy, and are now working with a deeper understanding of the complexity of the challenge.
I'd be interested in starting a discussion to share:
The Importance of the Arts in Effective Altruism and Social Change
While art is a powerful agent to create social change by incentivizing civic engagement, political movements typically miss critical opportunities to collaborate with artists. The presentation will begin by analyzing the theory why art creates impact. As a practice-led researcher, I will analyze both my art and the art of other artists aimed at fabricating social change. I will explain why certain interventions are more effective than others, and how we can leverage these ideas to create social change.
The lack of funding for arts research creates a lack of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of art. While the few studies have indicated that the arts is an effective agent for social change, less than 3% of funding in the arts are used for arts research within the US. Therefore, I will discuss the empirical evidence behind art for social change and why arts research needs more funding.
Despite multi-million dollar donations within the art world, these funds are disproportionately concentrated among few artists, curators, and collectors. Meanwhile, the average artist will live below the poverty line at some point ... (read more)
The importance and challenges of estimating existential risk
To make effective prioritisation decisions in relation to existential risks, we need estimates of the risks from various sources and of how various actions would reduce those risks. However, such estimates are extremely rare, extremely hard to make, and extremely hard to judge the reliability of. These conditions create risks of either ignoring expert views or overly anchoring on them, and of overlooking either the points of consensus that do exist or the vast disagreements and uncertainties that remain.
To mitigate these issues, I’ve collected all estimates of existential risk (or similarly extreme outcomes) I could find in a single database. This database can be collaboratively added to over time as new estimates are made or old estimates found, and it currently has ~70 existential risk estimates.
This session would expand on the above points, discussing why we need existential risk estimates, why it's hard to make such estimates or even just to know how much we should update our beliefs based on experts' estimates, what options this leaves us with, and why building and using this database is the best of t... (read more)
What prevents researchers from prioritising x-risk?
Questions
This proposal aims to answer the following questions:
Background
Most longtermist EA-inspired organisations advocate for and support research on existential risk (among other topics). They do so, presumably, in the hope that, by providing information and resources to researchers, researchers' views and efforts will shift in favour of more impactful topics.
Yet, little is known about several factors that appear critical to this theory of change. I am not aware of work concerning:
(That said, I am sure that research exists on questions broadly analogous to those above.)
M... (read more)
What is forecasting and how do I get started?
I'm currently teaching this as a 4x90 minute course. If there was sufficient interest I'd be happy to put together a half hour lightning version.
Edit: looks like I was about a week late having this idea, though I'm still happy to run this at some point if people want.
*Match for More*--An organization seeking to cultivate a community of EA professionals who leverage their company's matching program towards EA-align charities/causes.
My colleague and I have been working on developing an organization/community that, similar to the way GWWC fosters a community of effective givers who pledge 10% of their income, we look to cultivate a community of those effectively leveraging their company’s matching opportunities, and specifically leveraging them towards various EA-aligned causes and organizations. We believe that this organization, called 'Match for More', can have an impact on professionals’ charitable contributions and longevity, their allocation effectiveness, and their ability to speak more about their donation opportunities in a social atmosphere that will continue to motivate and spread the giving mentality that lies at the core of EA values.
More details:
After just a bit of research, and some polling in various online EA communities, we’ve learned that there are already EAs out there taking full advantage of their matching opportunities, whether their own or that of their spouse or partner. Of the numerous... (read more)
Thanks for organising this Unconference! I really enjoyed both presenting and attending.
It seemed there were a lot of interested attendees, a lot of applications to present, and some applications that came in after the deadline. (Meaning there were some cool-sounding things I didn't get to see, like alexrjl and JuanGarcia's ideas!) And it seemed like this is a cool opportunity for people to raise some awareness of their ideas/projects and get feedback, and for attendees from across the world to make connections during the Q&As and icebreakers.
So I wonder if it might be worth doing something like this every month or two? There could be either this post or a new post where people can apply on a rolling basis by commenting, and each month or two the 4-8 applications with the highest karma that haven't already been done go ahead. And then new people can apply for the next time, and the prior applications can continue to gain karma. And maybe there'd just be one "track" for each time slot, as there's always next time to do presentations that couldn't be gotten to this time.
I imagine the EAGxVirtual team would do a great job of this, but also ... (read more)
What is the best leadership structure for (college) EA clubs?
A few people in the EA group organizers slack (6 to be exact) expressed interest in discussing this.
Here are some ideas for topics to cover:
I envision this as an open discussion for people to share their experiences. At the end, we could compile the result of our discussion into a forum post.
TOPIC: Effective Altruism API and Blockchain-based Donation Platform
Summary
We would like to discuss and showcase two projects under active development. The first is our effective altruism application programming interface (API). This is a public dataset of information about the notable charities and charity evaluators that we would like to expand so that researchers and developers can query and use for their own purposes and projects. We could use your help to know what type of structures and features would be most useful to the community.
The second project relates to blockchain technology. Leveraging the power of the Ethereum network, and using the aforementioned API for data, we are developing smart contracts and a frontend interface that form a decentralized application. This platform enables donors to make informed decisions about their crypto donations to notable charities, as identified by well-established charity evaluators (to include 80,000 Hours, The Life You Can Save, Animal Charity Evaluators, and Give Well).
Presentation
We would like to present working prototypes of both the API and decentralized application during our time period. There would be a brief discussion
... (read more)Demand Reduction is a neglected approach in climate solutions
We want to share some ideas about demand reduction, which we feel is a neglected approach to addressing climate change. We would like to get feedback on these ideas and connect with other like-minded EAs. These are early-stage ideas that we are still making more rigorous and actionable.
Whereas energy efficiency improvements reduce energy and resource demands by making certain behaviors and processes more efficient, demand reduction is about reducing or eliminating those behaviors and processes altogether, thus avoiding issues like the rebound effect (see Jevons paradox and Khazzoom-Brookes postulate). For instance, whereas a mainstream approach to reducing the environmental impact of transportation would focus on shifting travel to trains or electric vehicles, a demand reduction approach would focus more on reducing the need for commuting and travel overall.
Demand reduction has several advantages as an approach: it comprehensively reduces environmental burdens, rather than only reducing emissions; it is less dependent on technological progress; it is less dependent on new investment; it is less complex and thus more robus... (read more)
Geographic diversity in EA:
Here´s a link to my recent post about it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zDktSTEstmy2X5big/geographic-diversity-in-ea
content copied here:
I suspect that due to lack of diversity, questions that could be relevant to EA have not been considered enough and here I share some of the ones that I deal with the most (although I don't have a strong position about most of these things and probably I just have not been aware if they DO HAVE been considered, in that case I would appreciate a lot if you could send link... (read more)
WORKSHOP: Global development negotiation
~~ Learn global development negotiation techniques from a trained negotiator. ~~
My background:
Structure:
Why to negotiate for global development? (0-1 min)
Negotiation techniques (with examples) (1-5 min)
Q&A (5-13 min)
Role-playing workshop on the Icebr... (read more)
AI Safety Career Circle
Putting this suggestion out there, because there are always people looking for AI Safety career advise, and this is a tried and tested format.
First round, everyone shares their career plans (or lack of plans).
Second round everyone who wants to shares career advise that they think might be helpful for others in the circle.
Must be late session if you want me to lead it.
Using General Collective Intelligence to Break through the Barriers to Global Transformation
I'd like to give a presentation on General Collective Intelligence or GCI, which is a decision-making system that combines groups into a single collective intelligence with vastly greater general problem-solving ability than any individual in the group. In this presentation I'd like to talk about why GCI might be critical to achieving virtually every group challenge when the group is big enough, potentially including all the global outcomes targeted by eve
... (read more)Add resources to the EAGxVirtual Notes
Wait! I know this may not sound groundbreaking but I think a collaborative session to link lots of related resources and opinions could be valuable.
What would we do?
For half and hour a group, with a video call would add resources and thoughts to the notes here: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/nathanpmyoung/page/yyARa8VKX
Why is this valuable?
We would end up with a much better and more linked set of notes, that would better answer peoples questions and give them more to read.
Also, we could use this to test out whther thi... (read more)