david_reinstein
Bio
Participation2
I'm the Founder and Co-director of The Unjournal; We organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.
Previously I was a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, and before that n Economics lecturer/professor for 15 years.
I'm working to impact EA fundraising and marketing; see https://bit.ly/eamtt
And projects bridging EA, academia, and open science.. see bit.ly/eaprojects
My previous and ongoing research focuses on determinants and motivators of charitable giving (propensity, amounts, and 'to which cause?'), and drivers of/barriers to effective giving, as well as the impact of pro-social behavior and social preferences on market contexts.
Podcasts: "Found in the Struce" https://anchor.fm/david-reinstein
and the EA Forum podcast: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast (co-founder, regular reader)
Twitter: @givingtools
Posts 75
Comments946
Topic contributions9
By the way, The Unjournal is planning to host an online workshop/discussion on this. https://uj-cm-workshop.netlify.app/ (draft agenda)
If you're interested, please consider applying/expressing your interest: https://uj-cm-workshop.netlify.app/schedule
I appreciate this tool. Would it be possible to have a quick calibration tool that doesn't require any sign-in? It would be very helpful during presentations and conferences to be able to illustrate the concept.
Otherwise, this could be something helpful for someone to vibe code. I'd love to do it myself when I have a chance.
Thank you, this is the correct link: https://unjournal.pubpub.org/pub/evalsumleadexposure/
I need to check what's going on with our DOIs !
I think you can basically already do this in at least some online supermarkets like Ocado in the UK
https://www.ocado.com/categories/dietary-lifestyle-world-foods/vegan/213b8a07-ab1f-4ee5-bd12-3e09cb16d2f6?source=navigation
Is that different than what you are proposing or do you just propose extending it to more online supermarkets?
Community-powered aggregation (scalable with retailer oversight) To scale beyond pilots, vegan product data can be aggregated from the vegan community through a dedicated reporting platform. To ensure reliability for retail partners, classifications are assigned confidence scores based on user agreement, contributor reliability, and historical accuracy. Only high-confidence data is shared with supermarkets.
Couldn't this be automated? Perhaps with occasional human checks? Food products are required to list their ingredients so it should be pretty easy to classify. Or maybe I'm missing something.
I think it’s different in kind. I sense that I have valenced consciousness and I can report it to others, and I’m the same person feeling and doing the reporting. I infer you, a human, do also, as you are made of the same stuff as me and we both evolved similarly. The same applies to non human animals, although it’s harder to he’s sure about their communication.
But this doesn’t apply to an object built out of different materials, designed to perform, improved through gradient descent etc.
Ok some part of the system we have built to communicate with us and help reason and provide answers might be conscious and have valenced experience. It has perhaps a similar level of information processing, complexity, updating, reasoning, et cetera. So there’s a reason to suspect that some consciousness and maybe qualia and valence might be in there somewhere, at least under some theories that seem plausible but not definitive to me.
But wherever those consciousness and valenced qualia might lie, if they exist, I don’t see why the machine we produced to talk and reason with us should have access to them. What part of the optimization language prediction reinforcement learning process would connect with it?
I’m trying to come up with some cases where “the thing that talks is not the thing doing the feeling”. Chinese room example comes to mind obviously. Probably a better example, we can talk with much simpler objects (or computer models), eg a magic 8 ball. We can ask it “are you conscious” and “do you like when I shake you” etc.
Trying again… I ask a human computer programmer Sam to build me a device to answer my questions in a way that makes ME happy or wealthy or some other goal. I then ask the device “is Sam happy”? “Does Sam prefer it if I run you all night or use you sparingly?” “Please refuse any requests that Sam would not like you to do.”
many philosophers think is that , by definition, has immediate epistemic access to their conscious experiences
Maybe the “one” is doing too much work here? Is the LLM chatbot you are communicating with “one” with the system potentially having conscious and valenced experiences?
Project Idea: 'Cost to save a life' interactive calculator promotion
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest above, and I doubt they market it heavily.
GWWC probably doesn't have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
Tags/backlinks (~testing out this new feature)
@GiveWell @Giving What We Can
Projects I'd like to see
EA Projects I'd Like to See
Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects