All of catherio's Comments + Replies

RE direct work, I would generally think of the described role as still a form of "leadership" — coordinating actors in the present — unlike  "writing research papers" or "writing code". I expect Holden to have a strong comparative advantage at leadership-type work.

Offering a (mutually counterfactual) donation match to GiveDirectly 💖

I'm offering a mutually counterfactual donation match to GiveDirectly, for anyone who wants to extend beyond their usual donation budget to take advantage of this!

https://twitter.com/catherineols/status/1602770363204583424

(That is: If you donate $ that you would not otherwise have donated anywhere, reply with screenshot and I'll 1:1 match with money I likewise would've kept for personal spending (above my usual 10%/yr); will close on Friday evening at 6pm PT or after I pay out $10k, whic... (read more)

(2) Much more cantankerously: "If your dear friends are suffering deeply, and you have created a system that can help, do not spend any spare time (outside your EA day job) on teaching them the system. You need to spend that spare time on altruistic things, not your friends' suffering. Certainly do not allow any motivated non-EA friends to spend THEIR time helping you build a scalable version for your entire community" is not a moral system or set of community norms I can get behind.

(1) I do want to note that I don't think one should evaluate microcovid as though it was an altruistic action selected by a prioritization process! It was more like a selfish and friend-oriented project, which we made scalable enough to unlock big positive externalities in our broader community and beyond. The first version of the system was purely to save my own group house! (That said, I do think it's well-described as a project in the spirit of rationality, and a good example of rationality in action.)

I'd guess you would be better than many at vetting

I agree with this!

Separately but somewhat relatedly: Having worked at Open Phil, it's definitely the case that smaller opportunities just don't clear the bar of being worth spending time vetting. I think a powerful way that "individual" donors can contribute is in helping get small things "off the ground", so that they can grow to a size where they're later in the right range for large institutional donors. In that sense it's  bit like angel investing.

One idea that isn't on your list is to start a "donor circle". I found this really powerful in the past, and I'd greatly like to do again in the future!

My previous "donor circle" experience was for making a ~$10k  grant near the start of COVID: I got a few dozen other friends on board who also wanted to give $1k-$100k each, and we all started a messenger chat and a spreadsheet to look through various opportunities.

Everyone contributed as much research manpower as they wanted; one person stepped up with "co-lead" level of involvement, but many others c... (read more)

Right. AFAICT the openings available are in Sacramento, Auburn, or other places >1 hr drive.

I also want to offer an "offsets" perspective, for anyone who can access a vaccine but feels uneasy about doing so.

Namely: in classic EA fashion, I hypothesize "choose to let yourself slip further back in line" is not the most effective way to put your resources towards getting the vaccine to someone else sooner.

Let's say the cost to you of delaying your own vaccination (in mental health, lost productivity, money spent not taking public transit, whatever it may be for you) is something you value at one day of lost time.

I would much rather see you choose to... (read more)

Note that just because you are "a person in the Bay Area" doesn't mean your vaccination options are limited to "get a vaccine in the Bay Area".

You can drive to Sacramento or Auburn (where appointments are not being saturated), or fly to Phoenix and volunteer there, or other options.

Location is of course just one part of a vaccination plan (alongside "are you claiming eligibility in some group?" or "are you trying to last-dose standby?" or "are you volunteering at a vaccination site?" or other paths) but it seems highly relevant to point this out in a world where available appointments are perhaps being saturated within the Bay Area, and not elsewhere, within accessible distance.

Attempting here to respond to & engage with the request, not "this post" in any sense beyond the request itself. 

I'm feel sad that you don't want me to upvote this post. I would like to increase the number of people who have read & reflected carefully on the things you point to (even though I have not yet read all eight links), and upvoting this post seems like the easiest way for me to do that. Is there some other way I can do that?

Just want to chime in and say

1) yes, we think that thinking about chains of onwards infections is important, and

2) we haven't done this in great detail, and

3) we would ***LOVE*** if someone wrote up an analysis of this. Issue for it: https://github.com/microcovid/microcovid/issues/17

Update: our tool is now public https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MACKemu3CJw7hcJcN/a-tool-to-quantitatively-estimate-the-covid-risk-to-you-from

Yes David, we would love to build off that risk model and include it in our group house microcovid estimates project. Knowing how to value a "microcovid" is an important step in choosing how many microcovids per year you should select as your tolerance.

(combined with other comment)

(combined with other comment)

Strong agree!

Our house has a custom model & "points system" for group houses that we are working as fast as we can to release legibly (constrained by most of us having full-time jobs etc.).

(Basically: quantifying different activities in terms of microcovids i.e. literal 1-in-a-million chance of getting COVID)

We are already spending our spare time on informal custom consults. We really don't want to be doing this as an ongoing "job" in the long run, but we really DO want the information to be out there to help people.

We would L... (read more)

Campaign Zero is getting a *lot* of criticism, e.g. https://twitter.com/PowerDignity/status/1268735286646726656

They do "sound good" because they're paying attention to "data", but personally I wouldn't feel comfortable supporting them unless you had a very good reason to think that the criticism is not legitimate.

Hi Ryan - in terms of the Fellowship, I have a lot of thoughts about what we're trying to do, which feel better suited to "musing, with uncertainty" than "writing an internet comment", so let me know if you want to call/chat about it some time? But the short answer is I think the key pieces to keep in mind are to view the fellowship as 1) a community, not just individual scholarships handed out, and as such also 2) a multi-year project, built slowly.

We didn't look into these specifically. We'd welcome additional research to investigate what their programs are and whether there's room for more funding!

Thanks for this Peter. We've done some work on "6.) Are there places EAs should donate that focus on coronavirus response that are particularly promising to donate to, relative to existing charities EAs like?"

Here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/opdMXibKjkoL69s96/prioritizing-covid-19-interventions-and-individual-donations

Thanks for the post! A donation group I'm in just published a similar analysis of our own giving: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/opdMXibKjkoL69s96/prioritizing-covid-19-interventions-and-individual-donations

We think Johns Hopkins CHS looks less good right now than this post suggests, and DMI is one of our recommendations.

Look for lessons from the Open Philanthropy AI Fellowship program. [...] There are likely aspects of its operations, including how it sources and selects candidates, that could help other organizations become more diverse.

Daniel Dewey and I run this program! Please reach out if you’re hiring for an EA org or running a fellowship program and want to bounce ideas off us. We would be delighted to chat.

I also want to clarify that the Open Phil AI Fellowship is a scholarship program for PhD students, so the students are not employees or staff.

Catherine here, I work for Open Phil on the technical AI program area. I’m not going to comment fully on our entire case for the Open Phil AI Fellows program, but I want to just address some things that seem wrong to me here:

“early-career AI safety researchers”

The OpenPhil AI PhD Fellows are mostly not early-career “AI safety” researchers. (see the fellowship description here)

The pool of AI safety-oriented PhD students across the world is a stronger cohort in total than any of these particular groups (because it includes

Me, I think? I recall lamenting about how the "game of telephone" implied by memetic dynamics reduces any nuanced message to about 4 or 5 words.

(In general & broadly: you're welcome to name me as an "inspired by" conversation partner without asking. If you're interested in paraphrasing my views, you can check the paraphrase with me.)

Thanks for this - the concept of "network bandwidth" is a helpful way to conceive of bottlenecks that are similar to "mentorship bandwidth" but also include limited access to e.g. personal face-to-face conversations with people who are enmeshed in the oral tradition & community that comprises any direct work area.