All of drwahl's Comments + Replies

Hey Pat, thanks for the heads up. You're right that, despite working on desktop and via the LinkedIn mobile app, the search link doesn't seem to work on mobile browsers.

One quick workaround is to request the desktop site on the mobile browser, which seems to load properly on my side.

Excited to see this is returning for another year! A few notes:

- This year's match is (currently) "only" for up to $50,000 (for reference, last year a total of $620K was matched), and might not last very long
- See e.g. my Every.org profile for a list of ~75 EA-aligned orgs on the site (as of Nov. 2021)
- Note that you can fund your Every.org account straight from your DAF
- Here's last year's post, with some helpful info in the comments too

2
Cullen
1y
Yeah, people should probably do right on Nov. 1 if they want to get the match.

Ah! Ctrl+Enter does work in the Playground. I was doing most of my development in VS Code--not sure if it's also supposed to work there, but I don't see it in the keybindings.json.

Re: settings persistence in Playground, do they also come along with the share links? The critical ones for me would be Sample Count and the Function Display Settings.

Looking forward to auto-formatting as well!

4
Slava Matyukhn
2y
Oh right, shortcut for VS Code is missing, filed. Share links are the only way settings persistence in the Playground works. But also for things such as Function Display Settings we eventually plan to support configuration through code and avoid adding too many UI settings (maybe even remove some).

Calculating up to annually_averted_health_dalys_time_discounted was taking me well over a minute in v0.3.0, but is down to ~5 seconds in v0.3.1--a big improvement!

I originally had to comment the actual model output (dollars_per_daly_equivalents_averted(20)) because it wouldn't return at all in v0.3.0, but now it's ~2 mins in v0.3.1.

For reference, the whole Causal model takes ~5 seconds to update.

3
NunoSempere
2y
Now down to 1 min (55 seconds) in v.4. My guess is it's the maps and reduces, we should look whether we can optimize their implementation.

One such project, already underway, is our work on interspecies comparisons of moral weight.

FYI this link gives me an "Access Denied" error.

2
Janique
2y
It should link to the section above, we'll fix it. Thanks!  

This is interesting, thanks for writing it up! I recently did an analysis of US cities (mostly looking for a wintering location, not a full move), and Tulsa ended up scoring relatively low, which was disappointing since I know there's a growing EA community there.

I'm really curious in your biking experience in particular, since that's the category where it fared the worst. I looked at bike commuter data, but I guess that's just a proxy for good commuter infrastructure, which is what I probably care about. Why do you think so few Tulsans bike at the moment?

2
NicoleJaneway
2y
Thanks for your thoughts, Dr. Wahl.   As alluded to in the post, biking is my form of transportation > 80%  of the time, and I wish I could single-handedly make the bike commute popular!! Theoretically, Tulsa is quite bikable because it's not too hilly or climatically extreme.   Traffic is not a big issue, and major roads tend to be wide / multilane.   I do tend to see more bike commuters when I'm downtown.  Less in Midtown (where I live) or Kendall-Whittier (another downtown-adjacent neighborhood). I think the primary barrier is cultural.   Tulsa is very tied up with the oil & gas industry, so it's not in the best interest of the elites to push green forms of transportation or increase the accessibility of public transit.  Accordingly, I think a lot of people take pride in having a nice car.  There's decent bike lane coverage.  I don't think they're used as often as they should be.  

I've been thinking about relocation recently too, though mostly through the lens of finding a better wintering location in the US. This post inspired me to at least upload (if not exactly document) my analysis to date. See here:

https://github.com/danwahl/schelling-out/blob/main/schelling-out.ipynb

And the current top 10:

                                         biking   housing     vegan    winter  summer     total
City             State                                                                         
Berkeley         California            2.142016 
... (read more)

Originally I made a digital SSC podcast (feed) so that I could listen through the back catalog of posts (the human reader version didn't start until ~2017). I ended up getting used to the robot narrator, so I just kept it running on ACX. One small upside is that the digital versions get created within minutes of new posts.

1
Arthur Conmy
2y
This is great and you should make a LW post; these are in a really nice format for shunting around.  As a small nit: any idea why the first few essays of the Codex (https://www.lesswrong.com/codex) are not here?
1
david_reinstein
2y
That makes sense. Still, I'm wondering if it might not be better to just continue the digital versions and put a link to the human reader ones, to clutter things up a little bit less. Or you might keep it up but put a link to the human reader version for people who might not know about it. It is certainly possible that some people actually prefer hearing a machine than a (particular) human. (Although his production value is very high, higher than mine was). By the way, as you probably know there's a reason why he doesn't record these until the day after the blogs come out: they are often adjusted/adapted and he wants to give some space for that to happen. On the other hand you could argue that people will just choose the version they prefer and we can trust the consumer here

This is awesome! I did something similar for Astral Codex Ten (feed, post) a while back. The human version is also good, if you like that kind of thing.

1
david_reinstein
2y
Why have a digital version if there is already an AC10 podcast with a human reader?
Answer by drwahlJul 25, 20212
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Here are a few other forum posts on the general topic of fiction and EA.

Along these lines, preventing childhood lead poisoning is another potential candidate.

Thanks for this (somewhat overwhelming!) analysis. I tried to do something similar a few years back, and am pretty enthusiastic about the idea of incorporating more uncertainty analysis into cost effectiveness estimates, generally.

One thing (that I don't think you mentioned, though I'm still working through the whole post) this allows you to do is use techniques from Modern Portfolio Theory to create giving portfolios with similar altruistic returns and lower downside risk. I'd be curious to see if your analysis could be used in a similar way.

2
cole_haus
5y
Oh, very cool! I like the idea of sampling from different GiveWell staffers' values (though I couldn't do that here since I regarded essentially all input parameters as uncertain instead of just the highlighted ones). I hadn't thought about the MPT connection. I'll think about that more.

I've done a little work on this, using techniques from modern portfolio theory, and uncertainty estimates from GiveWell and ACE to generate optimal charity portfolios. See here for a background post, and here for my 2016 update.

2
Phil_Thomas
7y
That’s interesting! I worked on something similar, but it only allows for normal distributions and requires pre-calculated returns and variances. Using the GiveWell estimates to create your own probability distributions is an interesting idea -- I spent some time looking through sources like the DCP2 and Copenhagen Consensus data but couldn’t find a source that did a good job of quantifying their uncertainty (although DCP2 does at least include the spread of their point estimates that I used for an analysis here ). One thing I wondered about while working on this was whether it made sense to choose the tangency portfolio, or just keep moving up the risk curve to the portfolio with the highest expected value (In the end, I think this would mean just putting all your money in the single charity with the highest expected value). I guess the answer depends on how much risk an individual wants to take with their donations, so a nice feature of this approach is that it allows people to select a portfolio according to their risk preference. Overall, this seems like a good way to communicate the tradeoffs involved in philanthropy.
0
Peter Wildeford
7y
Thanks, this is actually highly relevant to another piece I'm working on!