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Hamish Huggard

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Fill out this census of everyone who could ever see themselves doing longtermist work — it’ll only take a few mins
Hamish Huggard5d10

"What obstacles are holding you back from changing roles or cofounding a new project?"

Where's the option for "Cofounding a project feels big and scary and it's hard to know where to begin or if I'm remotely qualified to try"?

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EA datasets
Answer by Hamish HuggardOct 28, 20213

I'm aggregating and visualising EA datasets on https://www.effectivealtruismdata.com/. 

I haven't yet implemented data download links, but they should be done within a week.

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New Data Visualisations of the EA Forum
Hamish Huggard8mo2

I only included karma from posts you're the first author of. 
So the missing karma is probably from comments or second author posts.

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Philosophy PhD Application: Advice on Written Submission
Answer by Hamish HuggardSep 20, 20216

Not a philosopher, but I have overlapping interests.

  1. I'm not sure what you mean here. What's RDM? Robust decision making? So you'd want to formalise decision making in terms of the Bayesian or frequentist interpretation of probability?
  2. Again, I'm not sure what "maximising ambition" means? Could you expand on this?
  3. How would you approach this? Surveys? Simulations? From a probability perspective I'm not sure that there's anything to say here. You choose a prior based on symmetry/maximum-entropy/invariance arguments, then if observations give you more information you update, otherwise you don't.

I suspect a better way to approach topic selection is to find a paper you get excited about, and ask "how can I improve on this research by 10%?" This stops you from straying wildly off of the path of "respectable and achievable academic research".

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EffectiveAltruismData.com: A Website for Aggregating and Visualising EA Data
Hamish Huggard9mo1

Thanks for the suggestion. I don't have a super clear idea of what the main issues/chunks actually are at the moment, but I'll work towards that.

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[Creative writing contest] Blue bird and black bird
Hamish Huggard9mo5

Very cute. 🙂

I'm curious about your thinking on colour symbolism. On the one hand, ravens are smart and crafty, so "black bird = smart/strategic bird" makes sense. But on the other hand, blue is kinda an EA colour, so at first I thought the blue bird would represent EA. Why did you choose to make the lay-bird a blue bird?

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Statistics for Lazy People, Part 1
Hamish Huggard1y1

Thank you. I have corrected the mistake.

The relationship between Lindy, Doomsday, and Copernicus is as follows:

  • The "Copernican Principle" is that "we" are not special. This is a generalisation of how the Earth is not special: it's just another planet in the solar system, not the centre of the universe.
  • In John Gott's famous paper on the Doomsday Argument, he appeals to the the Copernican Principle to assert "we are also not special in time", meaning that we should expect ourselves to be in a typical point in the history of humanity.
  • The "most typical" point in history is exactly in the middle. Thus your best guess of the longevity of humanity is twice its current age: Lindy's Law. 
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