Benjamin_Todd

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A Model of Patient Spending and Movement Building

A hacky solution is just to bear in mind that 'movement building' often doesn't look like explicit recruitment, but could include a lot of things that look a lot like object level work.

We can then consider two questions:

  • What's the ideal fraction to invest in movement building?
  • What are the highest-return movement building efforts? (where that might look like object-level work)

This would ignore the object level value projected by the movement building efforts, but that would be fine, unless they're of comparable value. 

For most interventions, either the movement building effects or the object level value is going to dominate, so we can just treat them as one of the other.

Good news on climate change

That all makes sense, thank you!

Good news on climate change

I had a similar question. I've been reading some sources arguing for strong action on climate change recently, and they tend to emphasise tipping points.

My understanding is that the probability of tipping points is also accounted for in the estimates of eq climate sensitivity, and is one of the bigger reasons why the 95% confidence interval is wide.

It also seems like if ultimately the best guess relationship is linear, then the expectation is that tipping points aren't decisive (or that negative feedbacks are just as likely as positive feedbacks).

Does that seem right?

Good news on climate change

This is a useful post and updated my estimate of the chance of lots of warming (>5 degrees) downwards.

 

Quick question: Do you have a rough sense of how the different emission scenarios translate into concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere?

 

The reason I ask is that I had thought there's a pretty good chance that concentrations double compared to preindustrial, which would suggest the long-term temperature rise will be roughly 2 - 5 centigrade with 95% confidence – using the latest estimate of ECS.

 

However, the estimates in the table are mostly lower than this. Are they lower because:

  • Concentrations won't double on these emission scenarios?
  • The world will still be warming in 2100, and won't have yet reached equilibrium?
  • Something else I'm not understanding?
What's the role of donations now that the EA movement is richer than ever?

I don't mean to imply that, and I agree it probably doesn't make sense to think longtermist causes are top and then not donate to them. I was just using 10x GiveDirectly as an example of where the bar is within near termism. For longtermists, the equivalent is donating to the EA Long-term or Infrastructure Funds. Personally I'd donate to those over GiveWell-recommended charities. I've edited the post to clarify.

EA Forum engagement doubled in the last year

Would be useful to see the number of unique users over time, rather than just engagement hours.

Can EA leverage an Elon-vs-world-hunger news cycle?

Is the aim here to generate a bunch of PR for EA, or to actually convince Elon Musk to do more EA-aligned giving?
 

If the latter, I doubt trying to publicly pressure him into donating to an EA global poverty charity as part of a twitter debate is the best way to do it. (In fact, he already knows several EAs and has donated to EA orgs before.)

 

The 'get PR' angle (along the lines of what Fin is saying below) seems more promising – in that ideally we'd have more 'public intellectuals' focused on getting EA into the media & news cycle. This is mainly because the main candidates are doing things that seem even higher value, but I would like to fix this.

Can EA leverage an Elon-vs-world-hunger news cycle?

I'd actually say there's a lot of work done on recruiting HNW donors - it's just mainly done via one-on-one meetings so not very visible.

That said, Open Philanthropy, Effective Giving, Founder's Pledge, Longview & Generation Pledge all have it as part of their mission.

There would be even more work on it, but right now the bottleneck seems to be figuring out how to spend the money we already have (we're only deploying $400m p.a. out of over $40bn+,  under 1%). If we had a larger number of big, compelling opportunities, we could likely get more mega donors interested.

What's the role of donations now that the EA movement is richer than ever?

It's super rough but I was thinking about jobs that college graduates take in general.

One line of thinking is based on a direct estimate:

  • Average college grad income ~$80k, so 20% donations = $16k per year
  • Mean global income is ~18k vs. GiveDirectly recipients at $500
  • So $1 to GiveDirectly creates value equivalent to increasing global income by ~$30
  • So that's ~$500k per year equivalent
  • My impression is very few jobs add this much to world income (e.g. here's one piece of reading about this). Maybe just people who are both highly paid and do something with a lot of positive externalities, like useful R&D or something like that.

Another line of thinking is that earning to give for GiveDirectly is a career path that has already been heavily selected for impact i.e. it contributes to global development, which is one of the most pressing global problems, it's supporting an intervention and org that's probably more effective than average within that cause, and it involves a strategy with some leverage (i.e. earning to give). So, we shouldn't expect it to be easy to find something a lot better.

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