My thinking was that Because they were doing influential research and brought in funding? FHI's work seems significantly better than most academic philosophy, even by prestigious university standards.

But on reflection, yes, obviously Oxford University will bring more prestige to anything it touches.

Why are people pressing the "disagree" button? Do they disagree with the idea that FHI brought prestige? Do they disagree with the framing? Is it because I have a silly username?

Clearly there's some politics going on here, but I have no idea who the factions are or why.

Someone help me out?

Why was relationship management even necessary? Wasn't FHI bringing prestige and funding to the university? Aren't the incentives pretty well aligned?

I'm also confused by this. Did Oxford think it was a reputation risk? Were the other philosophers jealous of the attention and funding FHI got? Was a beaurocratic parasitic egregore putting up roadblocks to siphon off money to itself? Garden variety incompetence?

oh hmm.

Looks like https://www.nonlinear.org/network.html doesn't throw that error. Will report this back to them.

oh hey

cool to see people are finding this useful

wanted the post to focus specifically upon how difficult it seems to avoid the conclusion of prioritizing animal welfare in neartermism

I wasn't familiar with these other calculations you mention. I thought you were just relying on the RP studies which seemed flimsy. This extra context makes the case much stronger.

Sadly, I don't think that approach is correct. The 5th percentile of a product of random variables is not the product of the 5th percentiles---in fact, in general, it's going to be a product of much higher percentiles (20+).

I don't think that's true either. 

If you're multiplying noramlly distributed distributions, the general rule is that you add the percentage variances in quadrature.

Which I don't think converges to a specific percentile like 20+. As more and more uncertainties cancel out the relative contribution of any given uncertainty goes to zero.

IDK. I did explicitly say that my calculation wasn't correct. And with the information on hand I can't see how I could've done better. Maybe I should've fudged it down by one OOD.

FWIW, I started very pro-neuron counts (I defended them here and here), and then others at RP, collaborators and further investigation myself moved me away from the view.

Oh, interesting. That moves my needle.

Thanks for responding to my hot takes with patience and good humour!

Your defenses and caveats all sound very reasonable.

the relevant vertebrates are probably within an OOM of humans

So given this, you'd agree with the conclusion of the original piece? At least if we take the "number of chickens affected per dollar" input as correct?

I analyzed OP's grants data

FYI, I made a spreadsheet a while ago which automatically pulls the latest OP grants data and constructs summaries and pivot tables to make this type of analysis easier.

I also made these interactive plots which summarise all EA funding: