(there could be many reasons why this is the case - people at EAG have a high opportunity cost of attending office hours as there are always other lectures and 1-on-1s happening; also, it takes a certain level of affluence to attend an EAG - any that I would want to attend requires me to go through a one-to-two month visa process during which my passport is not with me, and which costs up to 50% of average salary in my country, not counting the airplane tickets and housing in some of the most expensive cities in the world where EAGs happen)

For extra credit: 

How important is to you pushing to open EA groups in countries where a lot of aid is going?

What kind of research is CEA doing into the counterfactual value of people doing community building?

What are you (personally) proudest of about CEA?

Hi Michael, unfortunately it is late where I am so the clarity of my comment may suffer, but I feel like if I do not answer now I may forget later, so with perfect being the enemy of the good, I hope to produce good enough intuition pump for my disagreements:

1. An example of a market where the buyer buys for others is the healthcare market, where insurances, hospitals, doctors, and patients all exist, patients buy insurances, insurances pay hospitals, which pay doctors (in the US doctors may work as small sole-traders within the hospital like a shop in a mall). As a result, a lot of market failure happens (moral hazard, adverse selection). In this case, you would have to model that each seller and buyer is perfectly informed, and perfectly able to communicate the needs of those they help, which is problematic. I know how much I need something, so I buy it, but here, a fund needs to guess how much donors wanted something improved, while a charity guesses how much improvement the recepients got, and then they meet in the middle? Troublesome; perhaps in this case you just pay the smartest charity people (a la Charity Entrepreneurship) and trust them to do the best they can, instead of spending energy competing with others to prove their worth.
2. This brings in the problem of market distortions through advertising - whichever charity spends more on looking good to buyers can get more than an equivalent one who does not, so the equilibrium tends to go towards "advertising". This can be all sorts of signalling which creates noise.
3. Good is hard to measure, and most things that are hard to measure have markets that end up in very inefficient equilibria (healthcare, education, public transport) and are better off being centrally regulated (to an extent) in many cases.
4. Counting on the people in the market caring about externalities as you do above passes the buck, but is actually a vulnerability of the system - people who come there and do not care about externalities would then have better looking numbers. Also, humans are bad at noticing all of their externalities - I would hardly expect an AI safety researcher to be good at considering how much is the ecological footprint of their solution, or even to think about doing so. Instead, a regulatory body can set standards that have to be met, making it easier for sellers to know what they need to have in order to compete on the market. Free market is bad at solving this.

Hope these make sense, and serve as discussion points for further thinking! Let me know your thoughts on these, I am curious to better understand if this makes you update away from your position, or if you had thought of this in ways I did not fully grasp.

EA Mental Health Navigator works like this - you recommend people you worked with, anyone can add people on the list, and it's "open source" so funders don't get some special say. I think the author of this post has a running list of Service providers like that, so that'll fix it too.

Perhaps the feeling of achievement gained from cookie-clicker games, such as FarmVille and such, that have taken over all the old and young people's temporary attention? Gambling in Gatcha or Online Gambling? Opioids epidemic?

If you, the person reading this, are interested in helping with AI safety but do not have a technical background in AI Safety and instead have it in complex sciences (evolutionary biology, sociology, economics, law, neurology...) do reach out to us at PIBBSS.ai . You will be late for this year's applications, but we may have other ways of cooperating, or we can put you on the list to be the first one to find out when we have new programs by signing up to our mailing list.

The penultimate link shows the retrospective on the last year. Mostly fellows are still working on publishable results, and without their permission we do not want to share what they worked on in specifics beyond what is in the retrospective. We are hoping in the long term to have a page on our website showing all the published works of our Alumni that started during PIBBSS.

PIBBSS Fellowship 2023 is officially open!

Application deadline: Sunday, Feb 5th, 2023

Learn more and apply here.

Information sessions: 1st information session, 28th of January, 17:00 UTC (09:00 PST, 12:00 EST, 18:00 CET, 01:00 [29th of Jan] Singapore) Zoom Link

2nd information session, 29th of January, 11:00 UTC (03:00 PST, 06:00 EST, 12:00 CET, 19:00 Singapore) Zoom Link

Hello Yi-Yang, thank you for this fantastic write-up. I am considering doing such research and motivating other Eastern Europe countries to do the same, and this was highly valuable. The reason why I want to do this, and one not mentioned here is:
Many charities and individuals are limited in who they can donate to, usually geographically. For example taxpayers in a country may only be able to donate their tax-deduction money to NGOs that help people in that country (I know that in China even stricter rule applies, that all fundraising in China can only go to local NGOs that work locally). In this case, people in a country have no idea what is the most effective cause to donate to, and there may be sizable gains on the margin from producing and publishing research that LPR might produce. It may guide government efforts, private donations, and local Charity clubs (such as Rotary, UN funds, and Red Cross), by creating a guide to causes in that country. Even if it creates no additional donations (and it might), just helping people donate to counterfactually better causes is a net positive.

Let me know your thoughts, and I'll be reading much more about this before starting anything for sure - but thank you for having a great resource for getting started!