All of GMcGowan's Comments + Replies

I'll ask the obvious awkward question: 

Staff numbers are up ~35% this year but the only one of your key metrics that has shown significant movement is "Job Vacancy Clickthroughs".

What do you think explains this? Delayed impact, impact not caught by metrics, impact not scaling with staff - or something else?

What does 'Big 3' refer to in "'Big 3' podcast engagement hours"?

>Cosmetics and skincare for those who (want to) look masculine

Any good resources in general, for the obvious requirement that I don't want to look like I'm wearing makeup?

Currently all I do is moisturise 

Is it at all fair to say you’re shifting your strategy from a “marathon” to a “sprint” strategy? I.e. prioritising work that you expect to help soon instead of later.

Is this move due to your personal timelines shortening?

I definitely think it's an (the most?) important argument against. Some of this comes down to your views on timelines which I don't really want to litigate here. 

I guess I don't know how much research leading to digital people is likely to advance AI capabilities. A lot of the early work was of course inspired by biology, but it seems like not much has come of it recently. And it seems to me that we can focus on the research needed to emulate the brain, and try not to understand it in too much detail.

That could happen. I would emphasise that I'm not talking about whether we should have digital minds at all, just when we get them (before or after AGI). The benefit in making AGI safer looms larger to me than the risk of bad actors - and the threat of such bad actors would lead us to police compute resources more thoroughly than we do now.

Digital people may be less predictable, especially if "enhanced", I think that the trade-off is still pretty good here in that they almost entirely approximate human values versus AI systems which (by default) do not at all. 

This is great, thanks!

I agree shooting for digital people is a bad plan if timelines are short. I guess I'm not sure how short they would need to be for it not to be worth trying.

I think if we wanted to produce BCIs we should just shoot for that directly - doesn't seem like the best plan for getting to digital people is also the best plan for getting BCIs.

I think that insofar as neuroscience helps make AI, that just speeds up progress and is probably bad.
 

That person is Oliver Yeung and he has done a two part talk where he discusses this - main talk, Q&A.

(I spoke to him to okay sharing these, if any interviewer wants to speak to him then DM me and I can put you in touch)

there will be someone in the world whose full-time job and top-priority it is to figure out how to write a proposal, or give you a pitch at a party, or write a blogpost, or strike up a conversation, that will cause you to give them money, or power, or status

IMO, a reasonable analogy here is to the relationship between startups and VCs.

What do VCs do to weed out the lemons here? Market forces help in the long run (which we won't have to the same degree) but surely they must be able to do this to some degree initially.

I would expect people to just cross post relevant posts?

Recent post responding to you

Thanks for this comment! Hard for me to give satisfying answers to everything which is the sign of a particularly good critique IMO. Re: PricedOut I will speak to you privately.

Gove's support for Street Votes seems to have been a passing thing, and the window for action may well have closed.

Unless you have private information then I don't really see how you're inferring this? He publicly supported it around the end of November and has said little since then. My understanding from his public statements are that they are still deciding exactly what to do and... (read more)

Thanks!

I'd always been a bit interested in the area as a bystander. In the first half of 2021 I realised that a) I had more money to donate over the next few years than I expected and that b) the EA movement had more money than I'd thought. This made me think that I should try to find something a bit unexplored to do with my donations. I went through the Founders Pledge research reports and this struck me as a good bet, where my donations would fill up a lot of the RFMF.

Great graph. I should probably have included some discussion of this being largely a regional problem.

Yes, to be clear Founders Pledge did tell me that this was probably worse than GD/other things all things considered, so I am going against their recommendation to do this.

I agree that the outside view of changes here looks grim.

I think it isn't exactly neglected when it comes to public attention, but the focus on supply isn't really there and most policies that are proposed are not very good. So IMO there is space for orgs that focus on supply and promote actually good policies.

Indeed, there are potential other positive effects (as with many causes). The biggest one for me would be if this lowers the perceived cost of immigration by reducing competition for relatively fixed housing, and thus enables more immigration. I think that's pretty speculative though, so I didn't include it in the post.

Alas, such an analysis is beyond me!

This made me more likely to give non tax-deductibily, and gives a useful resource to link to for other people

I'm not sure your points about the average global citizen being homophobic, religious, socialist, etc., actually matter that much when it comes to people deciding where they should allocate funding for existential risk

I vaguely remember reading something about religious people worrying less about extinction, but I don't remember whether that was just intuition or an actual study. They may also be predisposed to care less about certain kinds of risk, e.g. not worrying about AI as they perceive it to be impossible.

(these are pretty minor points though)

Do you have links to your other writing? Would love to read more of your work.

Nice, excited to see the $2m block!

If you’re not sure, we suggest that you aim to enter with a 1%-30% chance of winning.

What's the logic here? Expected value is the same in all cases right?

Can you share who the guarantor is this year? 

Good post. If you're interested, the "Street Votes" idea was developed into a detailed policy paper by another UK think tank, and then proposed to Parliament by some MPs. Shortly afterwards the housing minister was sacked and a new minister appointed, so things could go either way.

Founders Pledge also did a great report on this topic, where they try to estimate the extent of the problem (in the UK) and the benefits of fixing it.

Off topic, but I didn't realise you'd left Founders Pledge. May I ask what you're up to now?

That's true. I just listened to the most recent 80k podcast where they joke about buying up GPUs so it was in my head :) 

FWIW my reading of the question is: "What projects could be created, that have the potential to scale to $100m".  I didn't read it as suggesting funding a megaproject from scratch.

Many EA projects are of the "start a research institute" flavour, and will likely never absorb $100m. I see the post as a plea for projects which could (after starting with smaller amounts and then scaling) absorb these sums of money. Much like Givedirectly wasn't started with $100m/year budget right away, but has proven itself capable of deploying that much funding.

Out of all the ideas, this seems the most shovel-ready. 

MacArthur will (presumably) be letting go of some staff who do nuclear policy work, and would (presumably) be happy to share the organisations they've granted to in the past. So you have a ready-made research staff list + grant list.

All ("all" :) ) you need is a foundation and a team to execute on it. Seems like $100 million could actually be deployed pretty rapidly. 

Possibly not all of that money would meet EA standards of cost-effectiveness though - indeed MacArthur's withdrawal provides some evidence that it isn't cost effective (if we trust their judgement).

Thanks for the post, I found your thoughts interesting. I’m always glad to see discussions of where people are donating.

In general, it kind of seems like the "point" of the lottery is to do something other than allocate to a capital allocator. The lottery is "meant" to minimise work on selecting a charity to give to, but if you're happy to give that work to another allocator I feel like it makes less sense?

With that in mind, I have a couple of thoughts for things you might consider:

• Lottery again! You could sponsor CEA to do a $1m lottery. If you thought it

Thanks for reading!

I meant investing for a shortish period of time, and retaining control of the funds until I donate. So it would mostly be about deferring the decision for a bit while still getting tax benefits, as opposed to delegating the decision to the trustees of the Long-Term Fund. 

I  lean towards giving sooner instead of later for "hinginess" reasons. I also think the vast majority of EA resources are already invested in some sense (in human capital, expansion orientated organisations or  Open Philanthropy finances). 

I do think your fund is a good idea though, I can imagine changing my mind and there are certainly plenty of people who disagree with me!

Ah I see, thanks for clarifying!

I broadly agree that cash management could be improved at many charities, so thanks for this post!

The interest rate for the fiscal year should probably be based on the best available bank account rate. I think that is considerably less than your given interest rates, for example in the UK the best business savings account I could find offered about 0.9%.

What would you like to fund, but can't because of organisational constraints? (e.g. investing in private companies is IIRC forbidden for charities).

I have a cryonics contract with Alcor, and I pay annual dues to them. Most of this is counted as charitable giving.

Can you say a little bit more about this? I tend not to think of cryonics as charitable.

There seems to be something wrong with your footnotes formatting. They all direct me to create a new post on the EA forum, as opposed to linking to the bottom of the page. E.g. `https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/newPost#sdendnote3sym`

Interesting angle that I hadn't considered before!

Presumably this reasoning would change the calculus for a lot of other actions one could take as well? E.g. various types of global development spending that pay off in the future (e.g. deworming) would become worse relative to spending that pays off soon (e.g. bednets).

Rather than a mere 14 QALYs, kidney donation produces hundreds if not thousands of expected QALYs.

I feel that this may be too strong a claim. In the very long run, I would expect the population to rise to whatever the carrying capacity ... (read more)

The same goes for bunkers

For what it's worth, Nick did a shallow investigation of bunker building and found it was likely not very effective (not that this necessarily argues against general efforts to increase civilisation's robustness).

How do you view this interacting with considerations of giving now vs later? An alternate plan would be invest my donations for e.g. 10 years, then those plus interest would be enough to make me a largeish donor for that year - presumably with lower transaction and coordination costs.

Does that include National Insurance? As you can't claim back NI from Gift Aid, but you never pay it if you forego salary, the saving looks like it would be 12% on employee NI and 13.8% on employer NI (if I'm interpreting the taxes properly).

(source: https://www.gov.uk/national-insurance-rates-letters/contribution-rates)

I think old people just have more resources than young people, so they give less as a proportion of their resources.

Alternatively, you might think old people have had a lot of time to develop commitments to various causes, and so feel obligated to give more.

Have there been movements broadly like EA before? What happened to them? More generally, why have these ideas become so popular now as opposed to a few decades ago?

Thanks for making this Ryan, I love it already!