All of Charles Dillon 's Comments + Replies
I don't understand why you think this is the case. If you think of the "distribution of grants given" as a sum of multiple different distributions (e.g. upskilling, events, and funding programmes) of significantly varying importance across cause areas, then more or less dropping the first two would give your overall distribution a very different shape.
I think getting enough people interested in working on animal welfare has not usually been the bottleneck, relative to money to directly deploy on projects, which tend to be larger.
Seems pretty unsurprising - the animal welfare fund is mostly giving to orgs, while the others give to small groups or individuals for upskilling/outreach frequently.
Type 1 diabetic and long time EA here.
Generally when I have donated to help people directly (most of my recent donations have not been of this form, to be clear, in recent years my donations have been focused on research or on helping animals) I am not really thinking about how big the problem is. I am thinking "what will the consequence of this donation be?" If I am donating less than millions of dollars, I'm not likely to solve the whole issue, so the question of if the issue is big or small in a global sense just isn't very important.
For type 1 diabetes...
I think the layout of this post is quite reader unfriendly.
I strongly suggest you start with a full summary rather than just an intro, and don't bury your conclusions midway between the post and some very long appendices which are unlikely to be very useful to 90% of readers.
As it is, anyone wishing to respond in depth would basically have to do the work of summarizing the post themselves, which increases the friction on feedback.
The article gives a magnitude for fish farming. It does not talk about wild fish. Why is the scale of wild fish relevant?
Did you read the article? It is about intensive fish farming, and addresses all your points in detail, which you do not acknowledge.
I was not aware of the enormous weigth of aquaculture on final fish production. I was thinking it was around 10%, but it is close to one half.
https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-aquaculture
Onmizoid is rigth, and I have retracted my comment.
This conceptually seems similar to the meat eater problem argument against global health interventions.
You may be aware of this already, but I think there is a clear difference between saving an existing person who would otherwise have died - and in the process reducing suffering by also preventing non-fatal illnesses - and starting a pregnancy because before starting a pregnancy the person doesn't exist yet.
I think a lot of this coordination is implicit rather than explicit, and I don't think it's very well publicised (and there's room for marginal donations to change whether the org gets funded to their high Vs medium target for example, and signalling value that individuals think this is good, so I do not mean to say that this is the only consequence of a donation).
I think there is a misconception here - when it is said that these charities will be fully funded anyway, what that can mean is that they will try to fundraise for a certain budget (perhaps with high/medium/low targets) and larger donors will often choose to fill the remaining gap in their fundraising late in the fundraising process.
This means you are often not really giving the charity extra on top of their budget, but in practice funging with the largest donors. The largest donors will then often give slightly less to them and give to their next best opt...
I think it would follow from this and your radical uncertainty with regard to non long term interventions that you would want to include these donations as positively impactful.
Do you know how they tag the cause area of a given donation?
Is EA community building work considered separately, or included in "creating a better future"?
Suggestion: pre-commit to a ranking method for forecasters. Chuck out questions which go to <5%/>95% within a week. Take the pairs (question, time) with 10n+ updates within the last m days for some n,m, and no overlap (for questions with overlap pick the time which maximises number of predictions). Take the n best forecasters per your ranking method in the sample and compare them to the full sample and the "without them" sample.
Can you quantify how much work recency weighting is doing here? I could imagine it explaining all (or even more than all) of the effect (e.g. if many "best" forecasters have stale predictions relative to the community prediction often).
I expect the population of users will have similar propensity to update on most questions. The biggest reason for updating some questions more often is new facts emerging which cause changes of mind. This is a massive confounder here, since questions with ex ante surprising updates seem harder to predict almost by definition.
Unfortunately not - the person never followed up and when I asked them a few months later they did not respond.
I don't have many strong opinions on this topic, but one I do have and think should be standard practice is recusing oneself from decisions involving current or former romantic partners.
That means not being involved in hiring processes and grantmaking decisions involving them, and not giving them references without noting the conflict of interest. This is very standard in professional organisations for good reason.
I think the point is well made by Lorenzo, as someone who understands what the linked text is referring to and doesn't need to click on the link. I think it is good that the link is there for those who do not know what he meant or want clarification.
In general I think it is a bad idea to demand more work from people communicating with you - it discourages them from trying to communicate in the first place. This is similar to the trivial inconvenience point itself.
I think there should be much more focus on the question of whether this is actually a positive intervention than just one paragraph noting that you haven't thought about the benefits.
The claim that most smokers don't seem to want to quit seems really important to me, and could reduce the scale of the problem to the effects of secondhand smoke vs net benefits to smokers, which might be better treated with other policies (like indoor smoking bans for example).
The Gruber paper (linked below in my comment) suggests that reducing smoking actually makes the population of smokers and potential smokers happier.
In any case, it doesn't appear to me true that most smokers don't want to quit - see data on the US and even in China where most people don't want to quit, a strong majority (70%) supports the government doing more to control smoking.
Interesting post. I haven't conducted the depth research to verify most of the figures, but I do think the idea that you have a 55% chance of success with a $208k 1 year advocacy campaign pretty implausible and suspect there's something dubious going on with the method of estimating P(success) here.
I think an appropriate fact to incorporate which I did not see would be "actual costs of lobbying in the US" and "frequency of novel regulations passing" on which I presume there is quite a bit of data available.
Just a note on Jane Street in particular - nobody at Jane Street is making a potentially multi year bet on interest rates with Jane Street money. That's simply not in the category of things that Jane Street trades. If someone at Jane Street wanted to make betting on this a significant part of what they do, they'd have to leave and go elsewhere and find someone to give them at least hundreds of millions of dollars to make the bet.
A few thoughts, though I wouldn't give them too much weight:
The considerations I can think of look something like:
(1)Sonnen does work with some positive externalities.
(2)Sonnen makes some profit, which either goes to Shell shareholders, net of taxes, or might be used to finance other Shell activities.
(3)Shell might be able do other things with negative externalities and suffer fewer consequences due to positive PR effects from Sonnen.
Since Shell will probably evaluate other projects on their own merit, and can easily borrow money in financial markets, (2) ...
I didn't really think it was rude, more a somewhat aggravating tone, which may or may not be a different thing, depending on who you ask. I just took that it was for the sake of not having to litigate the point.
I think banning someone for a pattern of comments like this would be overly heavy handed and reflect badly on the forum, especially when many of Sabs' comments are fairly productive (I just glanced through recent comments and the majority had positive karma and made decent points IMO).
To be concrete about it, I think a somewhat rude person with good points to make, coming here and giving their perspective, mostly constructively, is something we should want more of rather than less at the current margin. It's not like the EA forum is in any short term danger of becoming a haven for trolling and rudeness, and if there are concerns it is heading in that direction at any point it should be possible to course correct.
I agree strongly here re: GWWC. I think it is very odd that they endorse a charity without a clear public explanation of why the charity is effective which could satisfy a mildly skeptical outsider. This is a bar that this clearly does not reach in my opinion. They don't need to have the same evidential requirements as Givewell, but the list of charities they recommend is sufficiently long that they should prefer to have a moderately high bar for charities to make that list.
To admit my priors here: I am very skeptical of Strong Minds effectiveness given th...
Your "best guess" is that the effect of a deworming treatment on happiness is a sudden benefit followed by a slow decline relative to no treatment? Do you have any theory of action that explains why this would be the case?
Trying to draw conclusions from such a dramatically underpowered study (with regard to this question) strikes me as absurd.
"However, maybe a small minority happy to do it would gradually build momentum over time." This seems possible, but if the goal is to maximise resources, I would be quite surprised if e.g. the number of billionaires willing to give away 99.99%+ of their wealth was even 1/10th as high as the number willing to give away 90%. Clearly nobody truly needs $100m+, but nonetheless I would be very wary of potentially putting off a Bill Gates (who lives in a $150m house ) due to being too demanding, when 99% of his wealth does approximately 99% as much good as all o...
I think a compelling reason for not doing this is mostly that it is past what I would guess the optimal level of demandingness would be for growing the movement. I would expect far fewer high earners would be willing to take on a prescription that they keep nothing above that sort of level than that they donate a substantial fraction.
I for one would find it too demanding, and I think it would be very bad if others like me (for context, I will be donating over 50% of my income this year) bounced off the movement because it seemed too demanding.
"I genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen. "
This is not credible, and anyone who thinks this is credible is engaged in motivated reasoning.
I still think you should have published the interview, but you don't need to lie about this.
There are options between credible and lying. It's possible, for one thing, that Kelsey was engaged in some motivated reasoning herself, trying to make these trade-offs between her values while faced with a clear incentive in one direction.
"Typically, this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself."
Jonas said that Nathan was making overblown claims here and on Twitter. In particular the inclusion of "and on Twitter" points to Nathan as someone engaged in irresponsible conduct, without addressing his substance, and thus meets the definition of an ad hominem IMO.
My second point addresses your point 2. As I said, there are many people w...
Thanks for the response. I still do not think the post made it clear what its objective was, and I don't think it's really the venue for this kind of discussion.
I think this is an irresponsible ad hominem to be posting without any substance or link to substance whatsoever. There are many EAs who know a lot about crypto and read the forum - if there are substantial criticisms to be made I think you can expect them to make them without this vague insinuation.
It's important that this is not an ad hominem.
I'm torn between:
- It is pretty annoying when Nathan has come in with a best-guess doc, being very transparent, to get such a blanket and vague statement argued from authority. An EA community that lost its ability to have open discussion and relied on authority like that would be a worse one indeed. And:
- If Jonas has received a tip from someone, but does not want to reveal his source, and his source does not want to post more details, this is the best Jonas can do. Jonas has added information to the commons, and been rewarded by losing karma.
There are writing issues and I'm not sure the net value of the post is positive.
But your view seems ungenerous, ideas in paragraphs like this seem relevant:
...This isn't a snide jab at Will MacAskill. He in fact recognized this problem before most and has made the wise choice of not being the CEO of the CEA for a decade now even though he could have kept the job forever if he wanted.
This is a general problem in EA of many academics having to repeatedly learn they have little to no comparative advantage, if not a comparative disadvantage, in people and o
I'm pretty sure the answer is no, you can't, for exactly the same reasons as why it would look dodgy to any regulators.
Additionally, the potential reputational harm to EA from this sort of thing probably should be taken into account.
There are enough sufficiently wealthy EAs that you might well be able to get funding from them if you have a good startup plan, without any reputational risk (and if you can't then this would be a weak but maybe valuable signal that your plan is not as good as you think).
That is why I left quite large margins for error, one of which you note, the other being that those 6 were only earning 1m+, not donating.
Demand for plant based meat having peaked is evidence against meat consumption declining, not in favour of it. And I don't think any serious unbiased analysts have suggested that lab grown meat would exceed 10% of global supply by 2040, if it ever becomes viable. See https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/2b9HCjTiFnWM8jkRM/forecasts-estimate-limited-cultured-meat-production-through for a much more typical and pessimistic take.
I would guess that you could ballpark the marginal value somewhere around market prices in the US, which a Google search says is $50-75 per visit. Plausibly this is higher in the UK due to shortages brought on by the lack of a market, this is not clear to me.
Does the NHS ever pay to import blood? If so, that number, times the average cost efficiency of the NHS, which I think is approx £20k per year of healthy life, should not be way off, though of course it is oversimplified in numerous ways.
Given the above, I would be a little surprised if any reasonable version of this calculation got an answer substantially higher than 1 quality adjusted life day.
Well done for doing this! I think attempted replications or re-examinations of existing work are under-done in EA and wish more were conducted.
Can you give an example of a point or points in there you found compelling?
That article looks like the usual "utilitarianism is bad" stuff (an argument which predates EA by a long time and has seen little progress in recent times) combined with some strong mood affiliation and straightforward misunderstandings of economic thinking to me.
I've edited it slightly to work on this, though it is not easy to make this point without appearing slightly callous, I think.
What was this distinct reason? If this was mentioned in the post, I didn't see it.
If it wasn't mentioned in the post, it feels disingenuous of you to not mention it and give the impression that you were left in the dark and had to come up with your own list of hypotheses. It's quite difficult for a third party to come to any conclusions without this piece of information.
This comment feels unnecessarily combative, even though I agree with the practical point that without this piece of information, 3rd party observers can’t really get an accurate picture of the situation. So I agreed with but downvoted the comment.
I'm a bit confused by all the drive by downvotes of someone sharing a quickly sketched out plausible-sounding idea.
I think we'd be better off of we encouraged this sort of thing rather than discouraged it, at least until there actually seems to be a problem with too many half baked novel ideas being posted - if people disagree I'd like to know why.
Very few. The 2020 EA survey had only 6 people earning 1m+, which doesn't necessarily equate to donating as much. It's unlikely, I think, that fewer than 5% of such people took the survey given it had 2,000 responses and I doubt think there are more than 10,000 committed EAs, so I think there are likely under 100 such people.
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nb6tQ5MRRpXydJQFq/ea-survey-2020-series-donation-data
I think it's reasonably likely that people earning $1m / year are systematically less inclined to bother with the survey, so I would be cautious about using the community response rate to extrapolate.
(On the other hand, 2000 is 5% of 40000, not 10000)
I expect much of the data is out there, because the majority of billionaires either want to give publicly, or they need to disclose when they change their shareholdings in their main source of wealth (in the case of the typical company founder) due to regulations, and donating to charity is seen as a good excuse to do this.
It may be rather difficult to gather though, as I don't expect there to be a nice centralised source.
62 pages is quite long - I understand then why you wouldn't put it on the forum.
I really dislike reading PDFs, as I read most non work things on mobile, and on Chrome based web browsers they don't open in browser tabs, which is where I store everything else I want to read.
I think I'd prefer some web based presentation, ideally with something like one web page per chapter/ large section. I don't know if this is representative of others though.
I'm glad you produced this. One thing I found annoying, though, was that you said:
"The evidence related to each outcome, and how we arrived at these values, are explained further in the respective sections below."
But, they weren't? The report was just partially summarised here, with a link to your website. Why did you choose to do this?
Thanks for posting this - on a quick read it looks pretty accurate to me and I'll be glad to have this as a resource to point people to when they seem not to understand exactly why what FTX did was so bad.