All of ianps's Comments + Replies

On a related question: I just posted a question to the forum, and once the page refreshed on the question I had just asked, it already had one vote. Is this an auto-setting where my questions get automatically upvoted by me, or did someone really upvote it in the few (mili)seconds before submitting it and the page reloading?

5
Aaron Gertler
4y
All of your posts start with a strong upvote from "you" automatically. Your comments start with a normal-strength upvote from "you" (as they do on Reddit). You can undo these votes the same way you'd undo any of your other votes.

What will the typical week of the new GovAI Project Manager be like?

7
MarkusAnderljung
4y
It's a little hard to say, because it will largely depend on who we end up hiring. Taking into account the person's skills and interests, we will split up my current work portfolio (and maybe add some new things into the mix as well). That portfolio currently includes: * Operations: Taking care of our finances (including some grant reporting, budgeting, fundraising) and making sure we can spend our funds on what we want (e.g. setting up contracts, sorting out visas). It also includes things like setting up our new office and maintaining our website. A lot of our administrative / operations tasks are supported by central staff at FHI, which is great. * Team management: Making sure everyone on the team is doing well and helping improve their productivity. This includes organising the team meetings and events, having regular check-ins with everyone. * Recruitment: Includes taking our various hiring efforts to fruition, such as those that are currently ongoing, but also helping onboard and support folks once they join. I've for example spent time supervising a few of our GovAI Fellows as well as Summer Research Fellows. It also includes being on the lookout for and cultivating relationships with folks we might want to hire in the future, by bringing them over for visits, having them do talks etc. * Outreach: This can include doing talks, and organising various events. Currently we're running a webinar series that I think the new PM would be well-suited to take over responsibility of. In the future, this could mean organising conferences as well. * Research management: This includes a lot of activities usually done in collaboration with the rest of the team, ranging from just checking in on research and making sure it's progressing as planned, to giving in-depth feedback and steering, to deciding where and how something should be published, to in some cases co-authoring pieces. This work requires a lot of context and understanding of the field. * Policy Engagement

Epistemic status: former geopolitical analyst focused on East Africa (for 2 years), but haven't kept myself much informed in the last 4 years and haven't read anything about the East Africa Federation.

I would have very little hope in this (estimate: < 1% chance of a federation with all of these countries being formed in the coming 25 years). Many (all?) of these countries have disputes of power along ethnic lines, so the idea of relinquishing power towards a supranational government seems very unlikely to me. E.g., South Sudan can barely for... (read more)

Thanks for replying, much appreciated! I have seen a bit more discussion on the topic in the news recently, I saw these two good articles:

(I though there was a very good BBC article as well, but could not find it now).


PS: in general, thank you again for your post. I was able to buy the essentials much before everyone ran to the supermarkets this last week.

First, thank you very much for this post!

Having a pregnant wife, I am trying to find more about the risks to her and the child, but could only find:

Does anyone have better information about the impacts of Covid-19?

2
eca
4y
Hey ianps, sorry for the silence (really busy time for me). I just found an article suggesting that in 4 tracked instance of infection in pregnant women, both the mother and baby have been fine, and the virus was not transmitted to the child. https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fped.2020.00104/full.

Does TLYCS plan to update recommendations for climate-related organizations, or investigate new ones?

7
Jon_Behar
4y
This is something that’s definitely on our radar screen due to climate change’s outsized impact on people living in extreme poverty. We also think it’s a cause area that’s of interest to donors (both our existing donor base and others). However, it’s unlikely that we’ll move forward on this until we have the capacity to add dedicated staff for charity assessment.
3
Kirsten
4y
Do you still recommend any charities or do you leave that to Givewell?

Great point for other people who are tring this!

I faced this dilemma when calculating the amount to be donated to CATF. My colleagues raised that we perhaps should use the 'average cost' to offset a ton of CO2 (assumed as $10) for the calculation. I was fine with the approach, of course, but since it was mainly one partner in the company that did the offset I did not want to multiply the sum by a factor of 5, in which case he may not have been willing to just pay for it himself and instead raise it to all the partners where it could have been blo... (read more)

Thanks, I was not aware (or read it long ago and forgot) of SolarAid, and I particularly like the associated health and economical benefits. But it's hard to make recommendations based on an evaluation from 2013 without at least a confirmatory follow up.

Regarding the low costs to offset, indeed, I got incredulous looks and comments about the cost to offset the carbon emissions from the entire company for a whole year as being too low to be accurate... I would say that there was even willingness to spend more (i.e., offset more than what we calculated) since the costs were so cheap. I would need a good argument for why the company should do that, but maybe I can find some for next year's calculation.

3
Henri Thunberg
4y
Personal reflection: Most opportunities to discuss this with people around me come up when they want to offset a flight or their yearly emissions. In line with your reasoning above the dollar amount for offsetting is surprisingly low to most people, which might be met by incredulity. In those cases it doesn't seem like they have a fixed amount of money in mind, but rather an amount of CO2, meaning me recommending an effective charity for offsetting just means they get to keep more of their money for other spending (in most cases of people asking me for advice unlikely to be charitable). I have been thinking about the best ways to approach this. Foremost I would always use the upper bound of the Founder's Pledge report, it's still not at a $/ton level that gets people worried. Then there are some options... A) Use a more "mainstream" offset calculator to get a higher dollar amount needed, but use that full dollar amount to offset a higher amount of CO2 with an effective charity. B) Try to reason from a "How much are you ready to spend on this?" viewpoint, where social pressure will make them suggest higher amounts per CO2e than the FP report estimates. If their reasoning is on the low side of things, one can always nudge them toward A) C) Point to the cheap cost per ton and try to get them to offset their whole lifestyle rather than just a particular flight. D) Start from B), but suggest that the difference between [Ready to spend amount] – [Cost of offsetting according to FP report] should go to a charity within a more highly prioritized cause area than climate change in order to both put the conscience at rest while also taking the opportunity to do more good.
2
jacobpfau
4y
True, it seems like solar-aid's own estimate these days suggests around $5 per tonne. I can't find a more recent external review unfortunately.

Thanks Aaron! I'll delete this post now that I created one as a question.