Glad you’re fleshing this out and pushing the community to take variety/diversity more seriously as part of population axiology. I’ve had similar thoughts in this direction, and I think the core intuition is very compelling.

Caveat that I’ve only skimmed maybe a quarter of the full post so far, and I can already see that it goes well beyond the simple claim that “variety matters”: it adds a lot of context, formal structure, and specific assumptions/conditions. So I’m not trying to say this isn’t a much needed contribution.

My reaction is more about framing. I worry that the “new theory” framing + all the new words may make the central intuition feel more novel or exotic than it is. Many people, including/especially many who would not identify as utilitarians or EAs, already have the intuition that the value of a world depends not only on total welfare, but also on the diversity, richness, or non-redundancy of the lives/experiences it contains — roughly, that additional near-duplicate lives have diminishing marginal value.

So I’d find it helpful to separate, as clearly as possible, the widely shared motivating intuition from the more specific Saturationist implementation. Otherwise I worry the jargon makes the view feel more alien or proprietary than it needs to be, when the underlying motivation may actually be quite intuitive to many people. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/W4JksntnuFABZCkCw/funding-strategies-for-global-public-goods

^ I would read this to get some perspective on how to think about funding mechanisms and converting all the way to morally actionable outputs. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mopsmd3JELJRyTTty/ozzie-gooen-s-shortform?commentId=GHT2r3ubscoXPwfb3

https://www.longtermwiki.com/wiki/E411 
https://ea-crux-project.vercel.app/ai-transition-model-views/graph 
 

^ check out what ozzie is doing here (ea quick take + longtermism wiki + ea crux project). 


https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zuQeTaqrjveSiSMYo/a-proposed-hierarchy-of-longtermist-concepts

^ good way to try to operationalize real world quantities into morally relevant long termism. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/y5n47MfgrKvTLE3pw

^ moral weights project to give baseline for moral circle sliders. 

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/3hH9NRqzGam65mgPG/five-steps-for-quantifying-speculative-interventions
^ broad post on trying to do this for more speculative stuff. 

but yea this is hard and goes exponential quickly 

My take is we should start by really drilling down a db of charity financials, charity outputs (or intervention outputs and charities are composed of interventions), then pipes for converting between outputs into outcomes, with fungible philosophy pipes that take outcomes and pipe into rankings

ranking charities requires solving or assuming:

• Metaethics 📚
• Population ethics 👥
• Philosophy of mind 🧠
• Decision theory 🎲
• Astrobiology 👽
• The nature of consciousness 💭
• Whether distance matters (in space 🌌 AND time ⏳)
• on top of all the boiler plate auditing. 

As a (not super confident) non-believer in real-money prediction markets, curious if you have a best steelman link/post you like or if you want to tell me why you disagree with me (basically the exact 3 reasons you listed plus some more context)?

seems to me we could get a huge chunk of the benefits with play money markets + the existing binary event contracts the cme already allowed. 

Well I'd guess first i'd just say I only ever thought much about this stuff in the context of Chicago, and even then just in my little slice of the world. I'm sure different places have different textures. 

Your second paragraph doesn't make that much sense to me. Do you think if meetup was free there would be way more events in your town? Seems unlikely to me. Don't get me wrong, network effects are totally in play in these markets and can create natural monopolies which reduce supply (and then market quantity) from social optimum, but i think that if it was 0$ instead of 175 you might have like 10-30% more groups. But it seems to me supply could reasonably 5x if we had a healthy society. 

"I also think you're overemphasizing the need for group culture and leaders to be designed well, since I think this stuff just naturally arises in environments where typical people with shared interests come together." Hmm yea my mind could be changed pretty easily, I'd just like to see the studies (or maybe there already are similar things done in psyche or soc, i haven't looked much). 

Re meetup and groups: You need to find a balance of inclusivity. Even though the purpose of a group is largely to socialize, the medium in which socializing takes place should be attractive in some sense orthogonally to how cool a person is. e.g. I like to go play basketball. I also socialize with the people at basketball. sometimes the people there are weird, it's ok, i still like basketball and have a good time and come again. Vs. a group that's basically just to socialize, the cool people get less out of it if the other people aren't cool and so they leave and it spirals. 

The reason I said "Developing online platforms that allow individuals to host in-person community events for free." was because Meetup currently costs $175 a year and is the main platform in my city

If people really wanted to meetup more, there are tons of possible ways it could happen cheaper, both through existing competitors (facebook events/groups, reddit, listservs, 222, RA, and way more, trust me). While sorting and selecting the best events is not extremely easy, it's not that hard. If you actually put a few hours asking around where events are posted and then 1-2 hours of effort scrolling through these things (local websites, instas) you can fill up your calendar with random stuff (although I will say I think a lot of young 20s people don't realize that you could just ask a few store owners and librarian where the events are and you will learn a lot).  It's true we could drive the marginal cost down even further and this should help some but after thinking about this alot (and trying to get people to actually join things and or/post events) i'm not convinced this is the core of the problem. I think the core of the problem is more that we don't have enough supply of actually good events and communities + increasingly entertaining other options that become hard to break habits so we might need some light paternal guidance in the right direction. Operationalizing this into a solution ends up looking closer to a religion than an app. 

I would also be interested in seeing what some researchers could come up with, and I def think there is a lot of innovation on the side of thirdspace design and group norms/ activity setups that can improve social life, but OTOH so much of what makes a group is its people and leaders, and that's not something that is easy to scale, repeating but scaling it seems more social movement/religion in nature than modern tech. 

Hey James, very concerned with number 1 also. I actually spent a year building an events app (i gave up), it's a very tough space. For one it's not clear why people need more two sided market places (spontaneous event/hangouts apps are also considered one of the biggest "tarpits" for entrepreneurs, though i'd caution reading too deeply into that type of stuff). ATP partiful and lu.ma are solid enough in terms of e vites, for really small groups you use i message.  then maybe you are gesturing more at meetup or pie but these apps suffer from weird sociological dynamics. You can not just get a bunch of lonely people together and have a good time exactly. The more you look into this stuff, the more it feels like an omni problem. It's hard to say the tractability. There is a huge design space of things to improve on, you gesture at this. The problem spans addiction, habits, thirdspaces, culture, trust, etc. I don't know if that's a good or a bad thing in terms of being able to make headway. 

I do believe ai might have some promise in terms of creating better events wikis (e.g. https://cguth7.github.io/events/ ). 

Feel free to reach out whenever, I have much more to say on the topic. 

more bang for your buck with soil nematodes

Our ancestors did not make this trade at all for the most part. Mostly they stayed hunter gathers, until the people who adopted farming out populated them and then expanded and killed/outcompeted them. (technically, I guess "our" ancestors are the ones who adopted the agriculture)

Very cool. 

I work on text parsing / meta science and do a lot of stuff like this on the side and for my lab. 

https://docgmedicalsummaries.com/rankings 

I've done something similar for ranking clinical medicine articles, it's pretty similar to your site but might be able to share some insights. (might comment more later regardless, just throwing this up for now so I remember). 

edit: also signing up will auto subscribe you to emails just to note but should be easy to unsubscribe, can also see how we do rankings without signing up on the landing page. 

What an insightful comment! Very well put I appreciate it.