Not obvious at all, and useful/helpful to share and remind us all of. 🙂

In the spirit of encouraging skepticism and critical thinking, I want to encourage everyone to remember how easy it is to believe false/inaccurate or fraudulent research if you don't have contextual expertise. Even well-known and well-respected academics like Acemoglu can endorse things without fully digging into the details.

I almost feel obligated to link to the blog post Beware The Man Of One Study (a good reminder to wait for meta analyses and to only update in a "Bayesian" sense) and to the book Science Fictions (excellent for learning about falsehoods in the culture and method of science).

Some notes about the graphs:

• These are from a project I did several months ago using data from the Common Data Set, from College Scorecard, from their Form 990 tax filings, and some data from the college's websites.
• The selection of the non-Harvard schools is fairly arbitrary. For that particular project I just wanted to select a few different types of schools (small liberal arts, more technical focused, etc.) rather than comparing Harvard to other 'hyper elite' schools.
• I left the endowment graph non-logarithmic just to illustrate the ludicrous difference. Yes, I know it is bad design practice and that it obscures the numbers for the non-Harvard schools.

I know that folks in EA often favor donating to more effective things rather than less effective things. With that in mind, I have mixed feelings knowing that many Harvard faculty are donating 10%, and that they are donating to the best funded and most prestigious university in the world.

On the one hand, it is really nice to know that they are willing to put their money where their mouth is when their institution is under attack. I get some warm fuzzy feelings from the idea of defending an education institution against political attacks. On the other hand, Harvard University's endowment is already very large, and Harvard earns a lot of money each year. It is like a very tailored version of a giving pledge: giving to Harvard, giving for one year. Will such a relatively small amount given toward such a relatively large institution do much good? I do wonder what the impact would be if these fairly well-known and well-respected academics announced they were donating 10% to clean water, or to deworming, or to reducing animal suffering. I wonder how much their donations will do for Harvard. 

I'll include a few graphs to illustrate Harvard's financial strength.

(My comment is maybe quibbling a bit too much and being too nit-picky. In general I strongly agree that most people in most situations would benefit from spending less time staring at their phones.)

I think of this less as 'using smartphones causes worse life outcomes,' and more as 'mindlessly scrolling through TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit^[1], and similar apps cause worse life outcomes.' I use my phone lots for years: flashcards on Anki to learn languages, listening to on Libby, or sometimes even reading books or articles. People can use their screens in wildly different ways. One hour of screen time is not the same as a different hour of screen time, anymore than TV is bad or books are good.^[2]

1. ^{^}

   Of course, users can curate these a lot. The default recommendations tend to be garbage, but if you selectively subscribe to (and block) some channels/users/feeds these can be incredibly useful. Many journalists and academics use Twitter as a primary way to learn about what is going on in their fields.

2. ^{^}

   Is one hour of a toddler watching Cocomelon the same as that toddler watching Bluey or Blue's Clues? Is one hour of reading War and Peace equivalent to one hour of reading Battlefield Earth? Of course not. The quality of what you consume (read, watch, listen to, etc.) matters immensely, and it can vary a lot within a single medium. Even on social media apps, an hour of scrolling through a r/personalfinance is very different than an hour of scrolling through a r/fightporn.

Can't people just buy VWCE/VWRP/IWDA?

Sometimes people can just buy those funds. I'm guessing that people in relatively wealthy/developed economies have the best options (and people living in their home country tend to have better options than people working internationally, since many finance/investment/banking things are restricted by citizenship). Most major European countries probably have services like Interactive Brokers or Vanguard or similar options (although I haven't looked into the details of it). And I assume that things generally are improving over time: things available now weren't available in 2015, and things which were available in 2015 weren't available in 2010. Commission-free trading is now very common among the large brokerage firms, which is a huge improvement for the individual investor.

Folks in Europe, UAE, and similarly wealthy/developed areas probably have the best options available to them. The investment options available to a Spaniard or a Emirati are probably better than those available to, say, a Peruvian or a Mozambican or a Vietnamese. A few years back a friend from [undisclosed non-OECD country] was looking to invest her savings, and the least bad option we could find was to pay extra fees to invest through a brokerage in her home country that allowed her to buy American index funds; the native/local funds just weren't very good. So she was able to invest, but it took extra steps and cost her more money to do so.

So I don't want to make it sound like nobody outside of the USA can invest. I just want to emphasize that it is harder for people who don't have the good fortune to be born in or to live in develop countries; they often don't have access (or have to pay more fees for access) to some of the following things, and it is a lot harder to build wealth if you don't have access to these things:

• low fee investment brokerages
• brokerages with commission free trades
• able to invest without risk of currency fluctuations
• index funds/mutual funds that track a good stock market
• being able to invest in global markets without paying extra fees
• tax sheltered/tax advantaged investments (Such at the IRA in the USA, a RRSP in Canada, or a Super in Australia)
• employer sponsored/supported investments/savings (a 401(k) match is fairly common among 'good'/elite/white-collar jobs in the USA)

If you will indulge me in some rambling, one thing that sticks in my memory is learning that a countries economy can grow a lot while it's stock market does quite badly. I wish I had the image to share, but remember an image from a finance class I took showing China's GDP growth over many years alongside it's stock market growth; if a Chinese person had invested a broad index of Chinese stocks, it would have had very modest growth. It disabused me of the notion that I should try to invest in a country if it's economy is growing. And of course, Chinese people have the added challenge that the currency can't be traded freely. And brokerages that technically have operations in China might not be open to retail investors; I recall seeing a few years back that Vanguard opened operations in Shanghai, but it was only private investment advice for high-net-worth individuals, and regular citizens couldn't open their own account. When I lived and worked in China as a foreigner with a visa, I wasn't allowed to invest because all the investment firms required investors to have a China National ID Number. (my apologies for focusing on China so much, it is the area I know best)

I am also an American who has occasionally given informal investment advice to non-Americans. I agree with the broad strokes of what is written above, and I want to add a note regarding how hard it can be for people who aren't Americans or who don't have access to the types of investment tools:

If you don't have some sort of employer matching, if you don't have some sort of tax sheltered/preferential account available to you, and if you don't have a way to access American stocks, it can be really hard to invest. Many countries don't have something like Vanguard, or don't have stock markets that have a long-term upward trend. Sometimes the best option is to try and open an international account to invest in VTSAX or VTI or VOO (or something similar), but that usually involves additional fees. So this is basically just to say that I have sympathy for how hard it is to do these things when you don't have access to several of the most impactful methods/tools.

From 1973 to 2013, a portfolio like this returned

Anytime someone picks a seemingly pointless and random date range like that they are biasing the results. Bonds had record possibly never to be repeated again returns in 1970s and stopping at 2013 ignores the tail end of this incredibly bull run we are in right now. Pretty sure if someone looked at 1990 to 2020 or 1920 to 2020 this overly complex portfolio wouldn't compare as well.

2013 cuts off before US shot forward past international. Conversely, international might shoot ahead next time. I think international exposure is good, but also remember that everyone can tell a story with a graph

The numbers look so good because bond rates were much higher in the past than they are now. 10-year Treasuries (for example) were over 10% in the 80s, while now they’re down below 2%. In the 70's those bonds were giving 15+ percent which will almost certainly never happen again. If you run the same test again but assume bonds max out at a much more realistic rate the performance will be much more in line with the risk (likely less than half the performance of US equalities).

Even if this was an optimal asset mix, most people are probably too lazy to manage something like that even if they could figure out how to set it up. There gets to be a point when the marginal gain for a different asset mix isn't worth the extra hassle and cost of rebalancing.

For the specific portfolio recommended in the 80k article, how often did they rebalance and what would your trigger point be for rebalancing? If you're selling to rebalance in a taxable account, then the capital gains tax is going to eat away at your investment gains.

Run ideas through Portfolio Visualizer and see how it makes you feel. The idea isn't to chase past performance but more to gut-check how you'd feel in the middle of a drawdown and then contrast it to where you end up.

(Note that these comments weren't my original thoughts, but are from a conversation about investments in which I brought up the asset allocation  recommended in Benjamin Todd's article)

I've noticed that a lot of the research papers related to artificial intelligence that I see folks citing are not peer reviewed. They tend to be research papers posted to arXiv, papers produced by a company/organization, or otherwise papers that haven't been reviewed and published in respected/mainstream academic journals.

Is this a concern? I know that there are plenty of problems with the system of academic publishing, but are non-peer reviewed papers fine?

Reasons my gut feeling might be wrong here:

• many I'm overly focusing with a sort of status quo bias, overly concerned about anything different from the standard system.
• maybe experts in the area find these papers to be of acceptable quality.
• maybe the handful of papers I've seen outside of traditional peer review aren't representative, suggesting a sort of availability bias, and actually the vast majority of new AI-relevant papers that people care about are really published in top journals. I'm just browsing the internet, so maybe if I were a researcher in this area speaking with other researchers I would have a better sense of what is actually meaningful.
• maybe artificial intelligence is an area where peer review doesn't matter as much, as results can be easily replicated (unlike, say, a history paper, where maybe you didn't have access to the same archive or field site as the paper's author did).

What countries/populations punch below their weight in EA when it comes to producing talent?

Fuzzy ideas, off the top of my head, regarding talent in the EA ecosystem:

• It is pretty clear that England produces more EA talent than we would expect from population and wealth. Part of this is probably due to excellent educational institutions, part of it is probably due to a sort of path dependency/founder effects, and part is probably due to bias in selection effects.
• China and India have enormous populations (as do Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Indonesia to a lesser extent), but many people are still living in fairly strained circumstances economically. Should we expect more Indonesian^[1] EAs then we have?
• Impressions can be misleading, and the plural of anecdote is not data. Maybe the fact that I haven't seen much Indonesian EA talent is due to my own limitations and perceptions, and maybe in reality there is an 'appropriate'^[2] amount of EA talent in Indonesia. After all, I don't recall ever hearing about EA Malaysia or EA South Africa, but a quick Google search suggests they both exist.
• Some countries seem to have a fairly strong EA ecosystem and have produced people who make real contributions. Think of EA Philippines (which many of us have heard of) or the EA talent pipeline in Hong Kong and China, both of which have produced people who have gotten jobs in major/central EA organizations. I have vague impressions of Switzerland, Norway, and Germany as a countries with relatively strong/developed EA communities.

A general underlying untested assumption here is that there are opportunities to 'invest' in developing talent, which on the margin would be cheaper. A dollar or a pound goes farther in Indonesia than in the USA or the UK. But these are exploratory ideas rather than confident claims, and an hour or two of judicious Googling could probably provide some useful data.

1. ^{^}

   "Indonesian" here is just an example. We could apply the same questions to Vietnamese, or Nigerian, or any other country/population.

2. ^{^}

   I'm using "appropriate" here to mean something like "the amount of EA talent, interest, and involvement that you would predict (the ŷ value) from a multiple regression that took into account factors like a country's population, wealth, level of education, etc." Similar with my use of "expect;" I intend it in the sense of ŷ.