All of garymm's Comments + Replies

I think the educational attainment GWAS you mentioned in footnote 2 was released. How does that update your estimates and why?

About a year and a half ago I seriously considered donating. I went through the screening and got approved to donate. During the screening process a doctor mentioned a study about post-operative pain, which I believe was this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790588/

IIUC, the study reports that ~1/20 donors reported chronic pain (that they self-report is due to the operation) years after the operation, and that those that do report a significantly decreased quality of life. The study doesn't have any controls, so it's possible that this is mos... (read more)

1
Derek Shiller
5mo
I don't have any special insight. I would be surprised if there were aspects of donation that made the surgery especially likely to result in post-operative pain, so I would imagine that the prevalence of post-operative pain in general would give you some clue about how reliable this study is. That said, given what I've read, if there were subtle ways in which it significantly reduced quality of life, I wouldn't be surprised if it wasn't well publicized. It seems to me a good sign that the doctor mentioned the possibility of post-operative pain to you.

Seems somewhat related to RadicalXChange stuff. Maybe look into that. They have some meetups and mailing lists.

Having read the account of B-59 in "Doomsday Machine", I think it was higher risk for odds of nuclear weapons hitting the USA.

DC, New York, and San Francisco are among the highest-likelihood-of-being-hit-in-a-full-nuclear-exchange cities in the US

 

What's the rationale behind New York and San Francisco?

If it's because they are major population centers, what are reasonable estimates + rationale for P(target population | nuclear war)? I would have guessed attacking military sites (and in particular nuclear-related sites) would be much more likely, and I don't think there are major military targets very close to San Francisco.

Agreed. Voting reform and forecasting are already getting attention from some in EA and should be integrated into this larger project IMO.

Relevant: "Towards a longtermist framework for evaluating democracy-related interventions". In particular the discussion of "accuracy" and "liberalism", but it doesn't discuss the topic of "what gets voted on" besides liberalism.

Thanks very much for writing.

How many of these concerns would apply to the "Let markets veto proposed bills" proposal that you mentioned in your summary of Futarchy ?

Or variations on that where some non-Futarchy (e.g., republican) process is used to determine the set of policy proposals that are considered by the markets. You could see this as a dial, where the more demanding this proposal process is, the less scope there is for the markets to choose, and vice versa. 

It seems to me that this would provide what you call a "sanity check" and avoid ... (read more)

I ended up:

  • Setting up a living trust.
  • Transferring the real estate to be owned by the trust.
  • Specifying in the trust that upon my death all assets should be donated to a donor-advised fund (DAF).
  • Specifying in the trust how the DAF funds should be donated.

I did this after verifying that DAFs do accept real estate. E.g., Schwab Charitable.

I'm in the USA and I own some real estate. I'd like to have it sold for the benefit of a charity after I die. If anyone has information on the best way to do this, please let me know, and perhaps incorporate it into the guide above.

Thanks!

1
garymm
2y
I ended up: * Setting up a living trust. * Transferring the real estate to be owned by the trust. * Specifying in the trust that upon my death all assets should be donated to a donor-advised fund (DAF). * Specifying in the trust how the DAF funds should be donated. I did this after verifying that DAFs do accept real estate. E.g., Schwab Charitable.
1
Tom_Ash
3y
I don't know the answer to that myself, but if you find it out and let me know I'd be happy to update the guide.

The link in the first sentence with text "here" and target http://effectivealtruismhub.com/actions/leaving-money-to-charity-in-your-will redirects to the EA hub home page, and I can't find any similar content on the EA Hub site.
If there is a more up-to-date resource on this, could you please update the link?
Otherwise, please remove it.

Thanks for sharing. I just started at Microsoft and will be reaching out to the mailing list to see how I can get involved.

One question / note:
 

Putting up posters across our large campus and dozens of building was both a lot of work and didn’t seem to get people to look into EA more.
 


Did you actually measure how many people took some action based on the posters?
For example, by putting a URL that went to a web page with analytics?

If not, you  might try that.

Sometimes it's a bit counter-intuitive what things work. For example, from Rationally ... (read more)

As a consequentialist I care about the outcomes (i.e. welfare impacts) of collective decision making, not how democratic the decision making process is. It seems like some other commenters are saying that voting system reform increases human utility by satisfying voter's preferences, but I think that assumes that voters know what's good. I don't think they do. Am I wrong that this assumption is being made? If it is being made, could someone point me to a good argument for it?

Perhaps a more promising project is focusing on changing what gets ... (read more)

1
garymm
2y
Relevant: "Towards a longtermist framework for evaluating democracy-related interventions". In particular the discussion of "accuracy" and "liberalism", but it doesn't discuss the topic of "what gets voted on" besides liberalism.

What is MAPS? (It's a hard term for Google)

2
Milan_Griffes
4y
https://maps.org Also there are other funding gaps in that space where ETG donors could make a big difference. Shoot me a message if you'd like more info.

Thanks for writing this.

Our needs are also varied, and may not cleanly map to a well-recognized job profile (e.g. Security Analyst or Chief Information Security Officer)

What do you think is the main difference between the roles you're describing and a Chief Information Security Officer role?

Our current best guess is that people who are interested should consider seeking security training in a top team in industry

Are there any industry roles that that anyone thinks would be particularly good or bad preparation?

I work at a large company and there are at least 10 different security-related teams, which from the outside seem to be doing fairly specialized work.

8
lukeprog
5y
On the difference between the role we've tried to hire for at Open Phil specifically and a typical Security Analyst or Security Officer role, a few things come to mind, though we also think we don't yet have a great sense of the range of security roles throughout the field. One possible difference is that many security roles focus on security systems for a single organization, whereas we've primarily looked for someone who could help both Open Phil and some of our grantees, each of whom have potentially quite different needs. Another possible difference is that our GCR focus in AI and biosecurity leads us to some non-standard threat models, and it has been difficult thus far for us to find experienced security experts who readily adapt standard security thinking to a somewhat different set of threat models. Re: industry roles that would be particularly good or bad preparation. My guess is that for the GCR-mitigating roles we discuss above (i.e. not just potential future roles at Open Phil), the better-preparation for roles will tend to (a) expose one to many different types of challenges, and different aspects of those challenges, rather than being very narrowly scoped, (b) involve threat modeling of, and defense from, very capable and well-resourced attackers, and (c) require some development of novel solutions (not necessary new crypto research; could also just be new configurations of interacting hardware/software systems and user behavior policies and training), among other things.