All of BenSchifman's Comments + Replies

I agree to an extent, especially at the very high level that you're talking about -- if someone hates programing or wet lab research I think it is unlikely to matter what the program or lab is. However, within more social science type research / work I'm familiar with I don't view testing your fit with different types of research as mutually exclusive with testing your fit for researching within a cause area. In fact I think they're often linked since the cause area influences the type of research and work generally you'll be doing. To take an area I know ... (read more)

Great post. I understand indoor air quality is the focus of the piece but if we're looking holistically at clean air we should also consider the significant health costs of air pollution outdoors. Patrick Collison has a great overview: https://patrickcollison.com/pollution

9
JDBauman
1y
I appreciate efforts to get Christians on board about AI risks, but respectfully, Antichrist memes aren't generally taken very seriously. A fundamental issue seems to be that most people (Christians included) don't take superhuman AI as a credible threat. How then could it be a candidate for the Antichrist? 

Thanks! I agree there isn't definitive evidence about water vs other flossing. For me it is so much easier to do water flossing that I also would favor that if it was equal or even slightly less effective than the alternative. 
I think my prior is that anything that mechanically moves plaque and food particles from in between your teeth -- be it water, "regular" floss, or something else -- is going to work. It probably depends as much on your technique as to the underlying mechanism and so I think this would be hard to effectively study. 

FWWIW, I do something similar for free using zoom -- I start a zoom meeting, share my screen and record the meeting (with just me in it). The resulting video is my face in the corner and my screen. Not as many features as Loom obviously, but free. 

4
Lorenzo Buonanno
1y
Smart! I think loom is also free (for now) if you don't use it to host videos, and I personally find it more convenient (I use the browser extension, I like that you can easily select a rectangle to record)

I have a fidelity DAF linked to my fidelity brokerage account and my only complaint is that there is a small cost associated with it. I of course understand why that is, and the tax benefits outweigh the cost. But if there was a nonprofit EA aligned DAF that had lower or no cost that would be preferable obviously. 

One other thought - and this isn't a complaint about a DAF exactly - is that it would be great to be able to set rules about when certain appreciated stocks would be donated to the DAF so I could totally "set it and forget it" -- I described... (read more)

Litigator with 10+ years experience here - completely agree with Tyler and not from knee jerk legal conservativism. I've seen talking to the press go very, very wrong personally. There's a reason keeping quiet is the near universal advice from experts. 

Thanks Rachel. If anyone else reading this has any more data on this point I'd be very interested. I'm helping with the first EA for Jews intro fellowship and we're thinking about how to assess its impact.  If 90-98% of people who do an intro fellowship never engage with EA again afterwards that seems quite strong grounds for rethinking whether we (as a community) should invest in intro fellowships as much as we seem to. And/or if we should experiment much more on different types of intros to see if there is greater impact.

But only 2-10% of students who start an intro fellowship end up engaging with EA afterwards;

 

Do you have a source for this? Thank you!

1
Rachel Weinberg
1y
This is just based on what Stanford/Harvard organizers have said to me. It depends who you ask and how they define retention but 10% is the number I hear thrown around the most.

On Facebook, the Effective Altruism group has 21,800 members, whereas the three main religiously-inclined EA groups that I could find (Christians and Effective Altruism, Buddhists in Effective Altruism, Spirituality and Effective Altruism) only have 1,700 members in total

There's also EA for Jews. Here's the facebook group :) 

Thought provoking essay, thanks Geoffrey!

2
Geoffrey Miller
2y
Oh cool, thanks for the link to the EA for Jews facebook group. Sorry I missed it!

A related idea is to incorporate EA ideas into existing religious institutions.  I'm involved in such a project. Eaforjews.org

Have you ever used Rapid Serial Visual Presentation (RSVP) for speed reading?  Depending on the content I can get close to 900 wpm!   An example online is: https://accelareader.com/

I use the chrome plugin swift reader

You could pick the name based on the "what3words" location description. For instance:  https://what3words.com/split.bigger.basket

In the portion discussing considerations by career path I would add:

When deciding which schools to apply to and more so when deciding which school to attend, consider the clinics, journals, centers, and other opportunities that are relevant for a topic area of interest to you.  Participating in these extracurriculars is a good way to learn about an area, signal to employers to have an interest in an area, and develop mentors and connections in the field.   There are significant differences in otherwise similar schools in this regard .

Excellent post! 

If anyone reading this is in law school or about to start and you would like my advice about how to succeed there  (including my unconventional strategy for law school exams) DM me and I can share a document I have written and shared with other EAs. 

I highly recommend the Founder's Pledge Climate and Lifestyle report.* Take a look specifically at Figure 5 and you will see that donating a small amount to one of their highly effective charities dwarfs the emissions from a single flight like the one you're proposing here.  

Zooming out a bit, in my opinion these kinds of decisions shouldn't about guilt (see replacing guilt series) but rather about taking the action that on net is best for others. In that framework working and donating to an effective charity that combats climate change--one of the wo... (read more)

Weird, the link (https://linktr.ee/ea_dc) works for me.  Maybe Link Tree was down for a spell? Anyway this is a link tree for Washington DC but it sounds like you're in SF. If you are back in DC feel free to DM me and I'll make sure you get squared away!

In the first sentence I think you mean SF?


I just moved to SF from DC and I did a bunch of google searches to find EA meetups in DC SF, and I found nothing whatsoever.

If you are actually looking for meetups in DC there are plenty including one tonight :) More info about this month's events here :) {edited to add the link is https://linktr.ee/ea_dc] 

1
trevor1
2y
That link sent me here: Also, I registered for an event on the 15th but I never got any sort of confirmation email, no idea if I'll be approved in time. I've seen this sort of thing before, it reeks of hacking by a 3rd party.

I don't know the time it takes or the direct tradeoffs but it seems possible that sharing EA content over an audio medium could be higher impact that other forms of community building, as the reach of a podcast is potentially worldwide.  Really depends on the empirics.  I am a podcast superuser though so I'm aware that I'm atypical and just because I'd like to listen while i do the dishes rather than read that isn't universal!

If you're open to adding more content, I would consider reading, say, the most upvoted forum post each month (or even each week if the reaction is positive and you have the time).  The EA Forum Podcast is, as far as I know, inactive these days. And nonlinear is doing text to speech but it isn't as good, imo. 

1
Peter
2y
Hey thanks for your reply Ben. I hadn't even considered this. I think someone was doing this for key posts on a podcast called the Effective Altruism Forum Podcast but it hasn't been updated since January. I have helped do readings for some of the creative writing contest entries. I'm not sure where they will be shared yet but do you think that would fit well on EAradio or be better off on something separate? I've thought about reading certain newsletters out, like ChinAI, but wasn't sure if it would be a good use of time compared to other possibilities like maybe community building, since these could just be added to the NonLinear Audio Library.

Thanks for reviving this!  I have rarely gotten around to watching youtube videos of EAG content, but I have listened to most episodes of this podcast :)  To directly answer you question, I would suggest adding audio from all the publicly posted youtube videos from recent EAGs (e.g., these), as soon as they are available ( unless there was bad audio quality or some other circumstance that would make it not work in an audio format). 

I also think that this would benefit from starting each episode with a short bit of music and a voiceover descr... (read more)

1
Peter
2y
Oh cool thank you. I think some audio explaining the podcast could be a good idea. I also post a summary of esch episode in the episode description. Not sure if it would be worth the time to record something for every episode. DM'd you.

Strong agree with the connotation of retreat being associated with leisure/opulence and that this is an optics issue. I think this is hard to answer in the abstract and the event should probably just pick a name that corresponds to what is happening. E.g., AI governance learning weekend; EA [City] community gathering weekend; etc

-2
sam_brenner
2y
Oh, nice, that's great to see! I'm also glad we agreed!

Interesting, it wasn't that one but that's a similar idea. I think this one I saw was more abstract -- like this one is focused on specific cause areas but I think the one I saw had stuff about evidence and reason and doing the most good. 

Hi Yitz! Our long term plan -- a very high level -- is to (1) do outreach to Jewish communities and spread EA ideas to those communities, and (2) to build a community of Jews involved in EA.  We currently have a number of projects in the works including EA fellowships and materials aimed at different Jewish audiences (including different denominations as well as demographics such as for b'nai mitzvah age Jews).  I'll send you a DM with more info and my calendly if you'd like to learn more!  

I kind of would like to see an EA version of one of these type of yard signs that are very popular where I live. I think I saw someone propose this but I forget where, doesn't seem like it was on the forum.  If you decide to do this you should probably have a forum post or contest or something to pick the exact language.  

1
Ines
2y
That's a good idea! I think the post you saw might have been this one
1
Rachel Shu
2y
That idea reminds me of this post.

I know this isn't the central part of the post but I'm not sure the title is really clickbait.  It seems like an accurate headline to me? I understand clickbait to be "the intentional act of over-promising or otherwise misrepresenting — in a headline, on social media, in an image, or some combination — what you’re going to find when you read a story on the web."  Source.

A real clickbait title for this would be something like "The one secret fact FTX doesn't want you to know" or "Grantmakers hate him! One weird trick to make spending transparent" 

This post clearly articulates a lot of the related thoughts I've been having and discussing with other organizers; well done. I will add my quickly dashed off thoughts, coming in particular from the perspective of a EA group organizer:

1. The time/ money trade off is real, particularly for mostly volunteer-led groups where volunteer capacity is our main bottleneck.  Nonetheless, in my view being cognizant of trade offs when allocating resources is core to EA, and it is a real loss when we just vaguely gesture at the time/money trade off and spend money... (read more)

Re: sending full posts via email: Aside from separate services like substack recommended below there are several wordpress plugins that do this.  (I looked into this a while ago when I was working on eaforjews.org but ultimately I decided not to do this for that site).  Would be happy to help you set one of these up on your site, I'd estimate it would take less than an hour.  

2
Julia_Wise
2y
Thanks - I did set up a way to email subscribers when a new post is published, but didn't manage to find one that sends the whole post rather than just a snippet (and didn't have some other downside). But I found the process of sorting through the different email sending plugins surprisingly difficult, so there was likely a service I didn't find or ruled out prematurely.

I don't have an answer for you, but I hope and expect the EA Market Testing Team will come up with some good suggestions! 

However - my intuition is there isn't one "best" elevator pitch because the persuasiveness will depend on the context and the person giving and receiving the pitch.  So the value of a generic elevator pitch might be less than you think.  

For instance, if EA coms up naturally in the context of charitable donations, I often talk about how excited I was when I learned about GiveWell, and how their research made me confident ... (read more)

7
Miranda_Zhang
2y
Piggybacking off this: UChicago EA recently started a meta-EA comms group & are meeting with the Market Testing Team to figure out how we can collaborate re: message testing frames for uni students! Narrower than this question & I don't have an answer (yet!) but just wanted to say that someone is working on a part of this question. We're going to actively look for collaborators as soon as we have a shareable draft proposal. : )

The website Labdoor tests supplements for quality and recommends several b12 brands. I don't recall which one I ended up purchasing, I think the NatureNow? (I remove the pills from the container so I can store them more easily) 

A related recommendation is the excellent 80k podcast with Mike Berkowitz which is about preserving liberal democracy in the US, so it is broader than just voting rights but includes useful information and recommendations on that front.   

Also this video details the process he used to make the song with DeepMind's Jukebox. 

This isn't really what you're going for but I find this Christmas song that was generated using AI to be quite funny.  

1
BenSchifman
2y
Also this video details the process he used to make the song with DeepMind's Jukebox. 

Just wanted to add my voice to the chorus of appreciation for your work Aaron.  I have an RSS feed of the forum and read at least the title of just about every post and it is really valuable for me.  Great work and best of luck in your next endeavors! 

Thanks Gordon!  I think an pan-interfaith group would be great! I'd love to compare notes and hear more about what your group is up to.  

Update: EA for Jews has launched! Here is the forum post with details. To learn more visit eaforjews.org, and if you'd like to get involved please fill out this quick form.  Thanks all! 

Yes! I have actually created a facebook group and will go public with a post on this forum and elsewhere soon.  The reason I haven't shared it thus far is we are still deciding on a name for the organization as a whole--there's been quite a bit of discussion as to whether "EA for Jews"; "Jews for EA"; "EA and Judaism" etc is best.   I'll post an update on the forum shortly, likely this week.  

Thanks @Weatequince! I'd love to chat more about this idea -- send me a message here or fill out the form with your contact info and we can discuss.

Thanks Josh!  I completely agree. I've been in touch with the founder of Jewish Effective Giving and my plan at this point is to make the EA for Jews (or whatever the name we decide on is) a much broader site, not duplicative of the Jewish Effective Giving site. We would however plan to partner with Jewish Effective Giving in the sense that we would direct folks who are interested in speaking to their (reform) synagogues about effective giving to the Jewish Effective Giving folks.  

Thanks for starting this project!  I'm not an audio engineer but I am a musician with a lot of audio editing experience (and relevant software), and I've got a few ideas to share about how  to make the sound quality better on these.  Send me a message if you're interested in chatting. I could potentially also help out with audio editing directly though my schedule is a bit full at the moment. 

5
D0TheMath
3y
We’ve talked in private, but I figure I should publicly thank you for your offer for help. edit: this is the thank you.

On mobile but not for some reason on the web version there is a "more platforms" button that gives you an RSS feed that should work on any player: https://anchor.fm/s/62cbeec4/podcast/rss

Sorry, I was unclear! GWWC's list of members who have taken the pledge is public but yes the dashboard is (as far as I can tell) just for you to record donations privately.  

A few "soft" or somewhat meta suggestions:

Thanks for sharing!  This could be added to this great post compiling EA Syllabi and Teaching Materials; I've suggested this in a comment there. 

4
Pablo
3y
In case it isn't clear, this was published a couple of days ago here. I mention it because the original blog post lists other courses that may also be of interest.

Thanks for this resource!  @velutvulpes just posted one that you may want to add: Ethics and the Future seminar at Yale

2
Aaron Gertler
3y
Just added this to save Julia some time :-)

I now do (almost*) all my donations through a donor-advised fund which has tax and convenience advantages I discussed in this post.  It automatically keeps a record of all my donations.  It's not a public record, just for my info.  [Edited to clarify that Giving What We Can offers you a "dashboard" to record donations, but unlike whether you have taken the pledge the exact donations you have recorded are not public].

*I occasionally donate to facebook fundraisers or other "one off" donations that I don't do through the DAF and these I don't t... (read more)

1
Laurin
3y
Thanks for the insight. I didn't know that the GWWC pledge tracker is something that you can share publicly. I thought it was just your personal dashboard to keep track of it.  Do you share your GWWC pledge tracker with others or do you keep it private? I'd be curious to hear what your reasons for either option are! 
Load more