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Quick takes

As one of the largest single donations ever, Michael and Susan Dell pledged $6.25B to provide 25M American children new investment accounts:
https://apnews.com/article/michael-dell-susan-trump-accounts-stock-market-poverty-inequality-7e2615d50a3fc0563109ed0eeb4c41e1

jessica_mccurdy's Quick takes

jessica_mccurdy🔸3h9

Quick Pitch for Using Toggl

Reduces task switching:
- Actively changing the task in Toggl makes you more aware of switching.
- Helps maintain focus on one task longer.
- For small or miscellaneous tasks, I use grouped categories (e.g. "Smalls", "Slack/email") and batch them.
Tracks time against priorities:
- Allows reflection on whether your actual time spent aligns with your intended priorities.
- Easy to spot when too much time is going to low-priority tasks.
Improves time estimation:
- Over time, you get calibrated on how long tasks really take.
- Some tasks consis

... (read more)

Noah Birnbaum's Quick takes

Noah Birnbaum5h20

PollsShow more

Re the new 2024 Rethink Cause Prio survey: "The EA community should defer to mainstream experts on most topics, rather than embrace contrarian views. [“Defer to experts”]" 3% strongly agree, 18% somewhat agree, 35% somewhat disagree, 15% strongly disagree.
- This seems pretty bad to me, especially for a group that frames itself as recognizing intellectual humility/we (base rate for an intellectual movement) are so often wrong.
- (Charitable interpretation) It's also just the case that EAs tend to have lots of views that they're being contrarian about because the

... (read more)

Yarrow's Quick takes

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸2d*7

Community

Rate limiting on the EA Forum is too strict. Given that people karma downvote because of disagreement, rather than because of quality or civility — or they judge quality and/or civility largely on the basis of what they agree or disagree with — there is a huge disincentive against expressing unpopular or controversial opinions (relative to the views of active EA Forum users, not necessarily relative to the general public or relevant expert communities) on certain topics.

This is a message I saw recently:

You aren't just rate limited for 24 hours once you fal... (read more)

Thomas Kwa

Assorted thoughts * Rate limits should not apply to comments on your own quick takes * Rate limits could maybe not count negative karma below -10 or so, it seems much better to rate limit someone only when they have multiple downvoted comments * 2.4:1 is not a very high karma:submission ratio. I have 10:1 even if you exclude the april fool's day posts, though that could be because I have more popular opinions, which means that I could double my comment rate and get -1 karma on the extras and still be at 3.5 * if I were Yarrow I would contextualize more or use more friendly phrasing or something, and also not be bothered too much by single downvotes * From scanning the linked comments I think that downvoters often think the comment in question has bad reasoning and detracts from effective discussion, not just that they disagree * Deliberately not opining on the echo chamber question

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸5h*2

Can you explain what you mean by "contextualizing more"? (What a curiously recursive question...)

You definitely have more popular opinions (among the EA Forum audience), and also you seem to court controversy less, i.e. a lot of your posts are about topics that aren't controversial on the EA Forum. For example, if you were to make a pseudonymous account and write posts/comments arguing that near-term AGI is highly unlikely, I think you would definitely get a much lower karma to submission ratio, even if you put just as much effort and care into them as the... (read more)

Jason

16h

I think this highlights why some necessary design features of the karma system don't translate well to a system that imposes soft suspensions on users. (To be clear, I find a one-comment-per-day limit based on the past 20 comments/posts to cross the line into soft suspension territory; I do not suggest that rate limits are inherently soft suspensions.) I wrote a few days ago about why karma votes need to be anonymous and shouldn't (at least generally) require the voter to explain their reasoning; the votes suggested general agreement on those points. But a soft suspension of an established user is a different animal, and requires greater safeguards to protect both the user and the openness of the Forum to alternative views. I should emphasize that I don't know who cast the downvotes that led to Yarrow's soft suspension (which were on this post about MIRI), or why they cast their votes. I also don't follow MIRI's work carefully enough to have a clear opinion on the merits of any individual vote through the lights of the ordinary purposes of karma. So I do not intend to imply dodgy conduct by anyone. But: "Justice must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done." People who are considering stating unpopular opinions shouldn't have to trust voters to the extent they have to at present to avoid being soft suspended. * Neutrality: Because the votes were anonymous, it is possible that people who were involved in the dispute were casting votes that had the effect of soft-suspending Yarrow. * Accountability: No one has to accept responsibility and the potential for criticism for imposing a soft-suspension via karma downvotes. Not even in their own minds -- since nominally all they did was downvote particular posts. * Representativeness: A relatively small number of users on a single thread -- for whom there is no evidence of being representative of the Forum community as a whole -- cast the votes in question. Their votes have decided for the rest of the commu

Zach Stein-Perlman's Quick takes

Zach Stein-Perlman2d*20

OpportunitiesShow more

Quick take on longtermist donations for giving tuesday.

My favorite donation opportunity is Alex Bores's congressional campaign. I also like Scott Wiener's congressional campaign.

If you have to donate to a normal longtermist 501c3, I think Forethought, METR, and The Midas Project—and LTFF/ARM and Longview's Frontier AI Fund—are good and can use more money (and can't take Good Ventures money). But I focus on evaluating stuff other than normal longtermist c3s, because other stuff seems better and has been investigated much less; I don't feel very strongly abo... (read more)

Showing 3 of 6 replies (Click to show all)

Thomas Kwa

My understanding is METR doesn't take Good Ventures money to avoid the appearance of COIs. We could maybe avoid creating actual COIs but it is crucial to the business model to appear as trusted and neutral as possible.

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸

What's the risk of an appearance that there's a COI? Is it that Dustin Moskovitz is an Anthropic investor?

Thomas Kwa5h2

Regarding COIs, it's probably bigger that Daniela is married to Holden, and while not strictly a COI, we don't want the association with OP's political advocacy. There are probably other things, I'm don't work on strategy

Thomas Kwa's Quick takes

Thomas Kwa7h4

When 80,000 Hours pivoted to AI, I largely stopped listening to the podcast, thinking that as part of the industry I would already know everything. But I recently found myself driving a lot and consuming more audio content, and the recent ones eg with Holden, Daniel K and ASB are incredibly high quality and contain highly nontrivial, grounded opinions. If they keep this up I will probably keep listening until the end times.

tlevin's Quick takes

tlevin3d*36

Effective giving

Consider whether you're comparatively advantaged to give to non-tax-deductible things.

(Not financial advice.) I think people -- especially donors who are giving >$100k/year -- often default to thinking that they should stick to tax-deductible giving, because they have an unusually high "501c3 multiplier" due to high marginal income tax rates or low cost basis for capital gains taxes. I claim this is a mistake for some donors, because what matters is whether your 501c3 multiplier is unusually high relative to the average dollar in the donor mix, which is... (read more)

Neel Nanda21h5

ETA: because I think lots of the dollars from individual donors in the EA giving space come from people with 1:1 or better employer matches, like Google or Anthropic

Google's donation match is $10k per person, and I would guess a bunch of donations from Googlers are unmatched

Jason

I'd note that when an organization files for exempt status within 27 months of its creation, the approval of 501c3 status is retroactive to the organization's founding. If the approval happens after the donor files their return for the current year, the donor would need to file a 1040-X amended return. So it's more accurate to say these donations pose a risk of non-deductibility (although I don't think the base risk is that high). So people who are willing to file 1040-X, which tax software can do, shouldn't discount much for application-pending status even if they highly value 501c3 status. This is probably a barrier for people donating through DAFs, employer matching programs, etc. and so I think your broader point that there's a higher risk of neglected less here is correct. Even if the organization files late, approved status is at least retroactive to the date of filing. https://www.irs.gov/instructions/i1023 [edited 12/2 PM for formatting]

Bella's Quick takes

Bella3d47

EAs are trying to win the "attention arms race" by not playing. I think this could be a mistake.

The founding ideas and culture of EA was created and “grew up” in the early 2010s, when online content consumption looked very different.
- We’ve overall underreacted to shifts in the landscape of where people get ideas and how they engage with them.
- As a result, we’ve fallen behind, and should consider making a push to bring our messaging and content delivery mechanisms in line with 2020s consumption.
Also, EA culture is dispositionally calm, rational, and dry.
- Th

Pablo1d8

An additional reason EAs may not be playing the attention arms race is that they may be persuaded by the fidelity model of spreading ideas.

Kestrel🔸

I'll add onto c) that AI safety cause area marketing is going really well (to the point I'm personally uneasy about it), and animal advocacy cause area marketing also seems to be doing ok. It's not just GHD cause area marketing that's working. My reservations about anti-marketing effects apply mostly to principles-first EA outreach.

Bella

Interesting!! Curious for any more detail on why you think this, if it's not too annoying to write out :) Yep, that's one of the things I'd be super excited about!! To that end, earlier this year I helped get started AI in Context, which has been heavily inspired by the awesome creators you mentioned above :) It sure is time and resource-heavy to get the videos out (we've only managed two so far (working on the third!) even though we hired the first programme staff in early Feb), but my hope is that it's worth it — the reception has been broadly very positive :)

DC's Quick takes

DC4d12

I have thought for years that targeted EA outreach to 'weirdoes' on the internet is much better than college clubs. I think it's much more likely to get aligned, interesting people.

Showing 3 of 4 replies (Click to show all)

My take was inspired by seeing this take: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FuGfR3jL3sw6r8kB4/richard-ngo-s-shortform?commentId=YbqaALPE3G2wRRCGt EA's recruitment MO has been to recruit the best elites it can on the margin, which I agree with due to power laws. However I disagree how to measure "elite". Selecting from people attending Ivy Leagues does adverse selection on the kind of person who gets into Ivy Leagues. Other people get into this rabbithole by following links on the internet. I would rather engage with someone who cares about ideas than someone following the power-seeking gradient. Now, SBF was both someone who was an early contributor to Felicifia and went to an elite university, so it's not to say that college clubs aren't drawing from both sets. On the margin though, these clubs will want to recruit themselves more by say tabling at their college, and that makes sense they want to do that but if I was a funder I would rather support something like say paying for some NEET running a Discord server to grow their server (depending on the topic naturally). This does select for less conscientiousness and my specific story for what to do could be wrong, but I think the overall thrust is right that selectivity should be more weird and in the age of AI we have better tooling for this kind of selection. Concrete operationalization: There's a long tail of search terms that orgs like CEA could do ad spend on that would be terms generated by highly thoughtful people. I would bet they are underspending on these terms. Also focusing on what these terms translate to in other languages, and doing more deep talent search in other countries and trying to integrate those people into our network. Is anyone buying ads on Baidu for the Chinese equivalent of the word "utilitarianism"? There could be a lot of low-hanging fruit like this that hasn't been considered. I'm not sure what I think about this recent take about the attention arms race but I think we share a sense

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸2d4

I don't think I agree either with the idea of recruiting people from elite colleges or recruiting "Internet weirdoes". I'm not against inviting in either of those kinds of people, but why target them specifically? I prefer a version of the EA movement that is more wholesome, populist, inclusive, and egalitarian.

I don't mean populist in the typical political sense used these days of being against institutions, against experts, highly distrustful, framing things as good people vs. bad people, or adopting the "paranoid style". I mean populist in the sen... (read more)

Bella

I would totally love somebody to do this; I know of at least one attempt to do something a bit like this a while back, but it wasn't easy / I don't think it went anywhere in the end. It's possible my team at 80k would be best placed to try it again, so it's going back on my longlist, thanks :)

huw's Quick takes

huw2d5

Anthropic are now offering Claude for up to 75% off for Goodstack-eligible non-profits :)

KevinO's Quick takes

Kevin Ulug3d*9

Effective givingShow more

The Double Up Drive is now live, with donation matching and the possibility of a tax receipt when donating from a variety of countries. https://doubleupdrive.org/2025-match-drive-preview/

Jakub Stencel's Quick takes

Jakub Stencel3d*60

Animal welfareShow more

One happy news for the world - Poland just banned fur farming. The legislative battle is over, the president of the country signed the bill, which is the last chapter of the process.

Yarrow's Quick takes

Yarrow Bouchard 🔸3d6

Global health

A number of podcasts are doing a fundraiser for GiveDirectly: https://www.givedirectly.org/happinesslab2025/

Podcast about the fundraiser: https://pca.st/bbz3num9

Mo Putera's Quick takes

Mo Putera3d28

Global health

I admire influential orgs that publicly change their mind due to external feedback, and GiveWell is as usual exemplary of this (see also their grant "lookbacks"). From their recently published Progress on Issues We Identified During Top Charities Red Teaming, here's how external feedback changed their bottomline grantmaking:

In 2023, we conducted “red teaming” to critically examine our four top charities. We found several issues: 4 mistakes and 10 areas requiring more work. We thought these could significantly affect our 2024 grants: $5m-$40m in grants we w

... (read more)

akash's Quick takes

akash 🔸3d1

Community

Posting this here for a wider reach: I'm looking for roommates in SF! Interested in leases that begin in January.

Right now, I know three others who are interested and we have a low-key signal group chat. If you are interested, direct message me here or on one my linked socials and we will hop on a 15-minute call to determine if we would be a good match!

mhendric's Quick takes

mhendric🔸3d13

Effective givingShow more

Another Philosophers Against Malaria Fundraiser has begun: https://www.againstmalaria.com/FundraiserGroup.aspx?FundraiserID=9418
In the last years, we got ca $65.000 in donations. Early donations are especially helpful, as they populate the page and give a sense of dynamism!

Any share with philosophers or university patriots that you know would be especially welcome. The fundraiser is a 'competition' between departments that aggregates donations; the winner is announced on the popular philosophy blog 'DailyNous'. Last year, the good folks at Delaware w... (read more)

Jamie_Harris's Quick takes

Jamie_Harris26d49

Animal welfare

I built an interactive chicken welfare experience - try it and let me know what you think

Ever wondered what "cage-free" actually means versus "free-range"? I just launched A Chicken's World - a 5-minute interactive game where you experience four different farming systems from an egg-laying hen's perspective, then guess which one you just lived through and how common that system is.

Reading "67 square inches per hen" is one thing, but actually trying to move around in that space is another. My hope is that the interactive format makes welfare conditions visc... (read more)

Showing 3 of 5 replies (Click to show all)

Jamie_Harris4d6

Thanks so much to everyone who took the time to play through this and provide such thoughtful feedback! I really appreciate it, and apologies for the delay in implementing these changes.

Here's what I've updated based on your suggestions:

Bug Fixes:

URL (@BrianTan ): Thanks for flagging! I think this should be fixed globally now.
Perching bug (@Ben Stewart ): You can now press P again to exit perching - no more getting stuck!
Arrow keys (@Sanjay): Fixed - they now work
Battery cage crowding (Ben): Adjusted the spacing to show the realistic density - you should n

... (read more)

david_reinstein

22d

Enjoyed it, a good start. I like the stylized illustrations but I think a bit more realism (or at least detail) could be helpful. Some of the activities and pain suffered by the chickens was hard to see. The transition to the factory farm/caged chickens environment was dramatic and the impact I think you were seeking. One fact-based question which I don't have the answer to -- does this really depict the conditions for chickens where the eggs are labeled as "pasture raised?" I hope so, but I vaguely heard that that was not a rigorously enforced label.

Sanjay

25d

I feel like this is a first step on the road to something that might be quite powerful at communicating chicken/hen welfare. The thing that was missing for me was that when I was "playing" at being a chicken in the different environments, I didn't see the point. I did various things, but found them boring. The easiest way to better gamify this is to explain upfront that the user will be asked to guess what sort of environment the chicken is in, so the user can better orient themselves to what they are trying to achieve. A better way to gamify is to add a welfare score. It would probably need some careful thought, because you want the scoring system to capture the idea that the chicken wants to do various different things (ie sitting on the perch, coming off, going back on again ad nauseam shouldn't get you a good score). It should also capture the idea that being pecked or harmed by other chickens hurts you, which teaches you not to get too close. And perhaps the scoring system might incentivise you to hurt other chickens (eg pecking them might make you feel less bad -- again, need this to align with how the animals actually feel and our best motivations of what motivates them to peck other chickens). The idea should be that no matter how well you play the game, your welfare will be terrible in the factory farmed condition, and less bad in the others. Another more minor point: the instructions said I could use arrow keys or WASD. I couldn't get arrow keys to work, which was a shame because I prefer them to WASD

Benjamin M.'s Quick takes

Benjamin M.8d7

Are there any organizations out there that would describe their niche as advising for small/medium-sized donors? I can't think of any, and I'm wondering why not. I'm not exactly sure what organizations that claim to advise large donors actually do, but it seems plausible that some things are also effective for smaller donors just because there are larger numbers of those. I'm thinking of, for instance:

tax law advice for effective giving
will writing advice
compiling resources on charity evaluations
conducting charity evaluations

ethai4d8

there was a post about this last year: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oFcLqTETnC8rajxeg/advisors-for-smaller-major-donors

tl;dr is (1) a lot of evaluators will do this for their cause area (can't speak to every one but Giving Green is happy to advise donors of any size, just shoot us an email); (2) look into giving circles inside or outside EA

I'd add that it's probably worth seeking a financial advisor for the tax law and will writing type questions -- a lot of EA advisories offer free initial services, but I've been told that total assets >10... (read more)

Jason

Can you define the class of "small/medium-sized donors" you have in mind? That means different things to different people.

Benjamin M.

I was being purposely kind of vague, but let's say people donating <100k a year? Whatever's too small for the organizations that advise large donors.

Mo Putera's Quick takes

Mo Putera9d20

I really like Bob Fischer's point #4 from deep within the comment threads of his recent post and thought to share it more widely, seemed like wise advice to me:

FWIW, my general orientation to most of the debates about these kinds of theoretical issues is that they should nudge your thinking but not drive it. What should drive your thinking is just: "Suffering is bad. Do something about it." So, yes, the numbers count. Yes, update your strategy based on the odds of making a difference. Yes, care about the counterfactual and, all else equal, put your efforts

... (read more)

NickLaing5d4

yeah i loved this a lot as well, interestingly was thinking of quoting it for a quick take as well.

Vasco Grilo🔸

Thanks for sharing, Mo. I liked that point to understand @Bob Fischer's general orientation better. At the same time, I did not find it that insightful. I think it makes a point while providing very little argument for it, and I do not seem to agree with the sentiment about the impact of moral views on cause prioritisation. It makes sense to have 4 years with an impact of 0 throughout a career of 44 years to increase the impact of the remaining 40 years (= 44 - 4) by more than 10 % (= 4/40). In this case, the impact would not be 0 "in most circumstances" (40/44 = 90.9 % > 50 %). So I very much agree with a literal interpretation of Bob's statement. However, I feel like it conveys that moral views, and cause prioritisation are less important than what they actually are.

Toby Tremlett🔹

+1! I'd add that we care about being right as a group, not being right as each individual. I don't think the most efficient distribution of resources looks like each individual spending years on their own cause prioritisation, making drastic career switches every year or so etc...