Kestrel🔸
Bio
I work as a researcher in statistical anomaly detection in live data streams. I work at Lancaster University and my research is funded by the Detection of Anomalous Structure in Streaming Settings group, which is funded by a combination of industrial funding and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (ultimately the UK Government).
There's a very critical research problem that's surprisingly open - if you are monitoring a noisy system for a change of state, how do you ensure that you find any change as soon as possible, while keeping your monitoring costs as low as possible?
By "low", I really do mean low - I am interested in methods that take far less power than (for example) modern AI tools. If the computational cost of monitoring is high, the monitoring just won't get done, and then something will go wrong and cause a lot of problems before we realise and try to fix things.
This has applications in a lot of areas and is valued by a lot of people. I work with a large number of industrial, scientific and government partners.
Improving the underlying mathematical tooling behind figuring out when complex systems start to show problems reduces existential risk. If for some reason we all die, it'll be because something somewhere started going very wrong and we didn't do anything about it in time. If my research has anything to say about it, "the monitoring system cost us too much power so we turned it off" won't be on the list of reasons why that happened.
I also donate to effective global health and development interventions and support growth of the effective giving movement. I believe that a better world is eminently possible, free from things like lead pollution and neglected tropical diseases, and that everyone should be doing at least something to try to genuinely build a better world.
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Comments118
Counterbalance: if you want to do research, do a PhD, if you can get one. It's the easiest research funding source available for someone who doesn't already have a PhD. Much of the rest of it can be solved by being smart and strategic about what you actually research. You can go to fellowships, research programs, events and training while doing a PhD.
I don't think EA should be recommending that its researchers drop out of research school.
(This is not necessarily disagreeing with you - I think a lot of people think they want to do research but actually don't want to do research, they just want to stay in a familiar university environment, and they need to figure this out.)
I'll give a couple of examples:
- EAs (of the longtermism strand) have a trait tendency to take a lot of low-ish effort low-probability bets in the hope that some of them will pay off big.
you'll often see people who think they can outsmart decades of expert study of an issue with a little effort in their spare time
I mean, isn't the idea that they might be able to contribute something meaningful, and doing so is both low-effort and very good if it works, so worth the shot?
- EAs (of all strands) have a trait tendency to morally mistrust authorities outside of their group (EA), deferring either to movement leaders they feel morally align with them or their own personal moral judgement
If EA deferred to the moral consensus, it would cease to exist, because the moral consensus is that altruism should be relational and you have no obligation to do anything else. People who have tendencies to defer to the moral consensus don't join up with EA.
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Again, not that these are optimal, but they basically seem to me to be either pretty stable individual difference things about people or related to a person's age (young adult, usually). It would be great to have more older adults on-board with the core idea of doing the most good possible being a tool of achieving self-actualisation, as well as more acceptance of this core idea among mainstream society. I hope we will get there.
I agree with the main takeaway of this post - settled scientific consensus should generally be deferred to, and would add on that from a community perspective more effort needs to be put into EAs that can do so doing science communication, or science communicators posting on e.g. the EA Forum. I will have a think about if I can do anything here, or in my in-person group organising.
But I think some of this post is just describing personality traits of the kind of people who come to EA, and saying they're bad personality traits. And I'm not really sure what you want to be done about that.
In descending order of amount I have donated to @CEEALAR , the Givewell All Grants Fund (my preferred "default" place to put donations), and the Humane League (something I feel obligated to do as a condition of being vegetarian rather than vegan). The largest donation was basically bankrolling the effective giving organiser retreat I am running at CEEALAR: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/events/HfeSKe7Ekmm9uddLh/effective-giving-organiser-retreat (which still has sign up space, by the way!)
I have also made a few non-effective donations to friends, to organisations I used the services of, or local places I volunteered for and want to see succeed, which are not in my pledge.
See also this post https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/vqaK5y5ksiDSfMzqd/the-crisis-ea-cannot-afford-to-ignore from a former USAID lead. It contains some other possibles.
The real answer is that war and genocide isn't a condition in which a randomised controlled trial can work.
Your client may be interested in Dabanga https://www.dabangasudan.org/en/about-us for Sudanese media reporting, which relies on external funding as it operates from exile and is probably saving a lot of lives via shortwave radio broadcasting so displaced civilians can avoid travel routes where they get murdered.
“We don’t actually think you should donate less to something because it’s more effective.”
(All the below numbers are made up for example purposes and don't represent the cost of chicken-related interventions)
Let's say that I want to have chicken for dinner tonight. However, I don't want to cause chickens to suffer. I have worked out that by donating $0.10 to Chicken Charity A I can prevent the same amount of suffering that eating a chicken dinner would cause, so I do that. Then I find out that Chicken Charity B can do the same thing for $0.05, so I do that instead for tomorrow night's chicken dinner. A charity being 2x as effective means I donate half as much to it. This is the "offsetting" mindset.
Effective Altruists do not (usually) think this way. We don't consider our donations as aiming to do a fixed amount of good and maximise effectiveness in order to reduce the amount we have to donate. We do it the other way around, usually: a fixed amount that is set by our life circumstances (e.g. the 10% pledge) and maximising the effectiveness of that in order to do as much good as possible.
Re: veganism, have you seen the FarmKind compassion calculator? https://www.farmkind.giving/compassion-calculator#try-it
It will tell you how many animals are raised for your food, depending on your dietary type, and how much money would be needed in donations to offset that.
The moral upshot here is that eggs are far worse than dairy from an animal welfare perspective, mostly because cows are a lot larger than chickens. So if you feel like adding animal products to make your life convenient but worry about suffering, add dairy products.
And also donate to effective animal charities. There's no reason to stick to the few $ per month (or fraction of a $ if it's dairy) needed to offset the suffering from your diet - you can do much more good than that. Most EAs aren't really into offsetting. We don't actually think you should donate less to something because it's more effective. This is just a calculator to attempt to explain more broadly why effective animal advocacy giving is good.
I'll add onto c) that AI safety cause area marketing is going really well (to the point I'm personally uneasy about it), and animal advocacy cause area marketing also seems to be doing ok. It's not just GHD cause area marketing that's working.
My reservations about anti-marketing effects apply mostly to principles-first EA outreach.
I also do recommend working for a while in a "normal job" before going back to uni for a PhD, as I think that's a really great way of sorting out genuine interest in research from inertia about not wanting to leave the university system.
I will plug my CDT here: https://www.lancaster.ac.uk/stor-i/