All of David M's Comments + Replies

I've written to my MP, James Asser, with something very similar to Sanjay's linked template.

Thanks for writing this up. On X, Joey Politano points out that this destruction of USAID (or even PEPFAR alone) dwarfs EA’s contribution to global development by an order of magnitude: https://x.com/josephpolitano/status/1896186144070729847

Is it a good idea for me to adjust the letter, or should I stick to the template?

The AIM charity UK Voters for Animals appears to think (based on when I attended a work party they ran) that letters/emails count for more when they are not obviously copied and pasted, to the extent it’s worth customising letters. I don’t know their epistemic basis for this, but I trust them to have one (I suspect they know people who have worked for MPs). But it might still make sense to give less-motivated friends a template to copy if that’s all you think they’ll be willing to do, since a templated letter is better than none at all. Though NB writetothem.com does block copy-and-pasted messages.

Thank you for this post. I’d like to add some argument for considering this a very high priority, or at least potentially one, since in your post people might not appreciate the scale we are talking about (due to comparison with ‘last time’ and mention of ‘low effort’).

Briefly, the slash to UK foreign aid dwarfs all EA spending on global health and development to date, and it seems like we are at a crucial moment that could influence whether the government feels this is at all accepted by the electorate.

Some quick figures from the Center for Global Develop... (read more)

Is it really the case that the UK and US were competing for the gains to reputation that foreign aid brings? I suppose I’d try to answer that question by looking at the history of where the 0.7% target, which I thought was fairly broadly shared among rich countries, originally came from. One history I found said:

> It results from the 1970 United Nations General Assembly Resolution 2626. The 0.7% figure was calculated as a means to boost growth for developing countries. Since 1970, however, only several Nordic countries have met or surpassed this target.... (read more)

Agreed, “linear increases” seems to be an incorrect reading of the graph.

Thanks for making the connection to Francois Chollet for me - I'd forgotten I'd read this interview with him by Dwarkesh Patel half a year ago that had made me a little more skeptical of the nearness of AGI.

Seems a lot of it is saying “you can’t put a price on x” — and then going ahead and putting a price on x anyway by saying we should prefer to fund x over y.

In her book, Ms. Schiller ties her criticism of effective altruism to broader questions about optimization, writing: “At a time when we are under enormous pressure to optimize our time, be maximally productive, hustle and stay healthy (so we can keep hustling), we need philanthropy to make pleasure, splendor and abundance available for everyone.”

Her conception of the good can include magnificence an... (read more)

CAF charges a fee for its services. This seems crucial to deciding between GAYE/Payroll Giving vs Gift Aid — from the intro email when I registered to do GAYE:

For direct CAF Give As You Earn donors, we take a 4% fee of your total donation to cover our costs (the fee will never be more than £10 per pay period).

Many employers pay this fee for their employees, and you should contact your payroll team to confirm if this is the case.

My employer doesn’t cover it so I’m looking for an alternative method.

In 2022 I applied to the marketing department of 80000 Hours. After a compensated 2/3 day (I can’t remember) work test, which ultimately did not get me the job, I was offered a feedback call. I instead requested the feedback in an email and received detailed feedback.

The paper says:

Permissivism can take multiple forms. For instance, it might permit both fanatical and antifanatical preferences. Or it might permit (or even, its name notwithstanding, require) incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti-fanatical. But apart from noting its existence, we will say no more about the permissivist alternative for now, returning to it only in the concluding section.

The takeaway, I think, is that those who find fanaticism counterintuitive should favor not anti-fanaticism but permissivism. More specifically, t

Now I want to know what the hell permissivism is!

Thanks for the helpful summary. I feel it's worth pointing out that these arguments (which seem strong!) defend only fanaticism per se, but not a stronger claim that is used or assumed when people argue for long-termism. The stronger claim being that we ought to follow Expected Value Maximization. It's a stronger ask in the sense that we're asked to take bets not of arbitrarily high payoffs, which can be 'gamed' to be high enough to be worth taking, but 'only' some specific astronomically high payoffs, which are derived from (as it were) empirically determ... (read more)

Hi Ben, I'm curious if this public-facing report is out yet, and if not, where could someone reading this in the future look to check (so you don't have to repeatedly field the same question)?

> I appreciate the push to get a public-facing version of the report published - I'm on it!

I found your description of applying effort to a really difficult task, and eventually making the hard decision to cut your losses, inspiring and moving. Thank you to CEAP’s founders, funders, and other supporters.

I think high X-risk makes working on X-risk more valuable only if you believe that you can have a durable effect on the level of X-risk - here's MacAskill talking about the hinge-of-history hypothesis (which is closely related to the 'time of perils' hypothesis):

Or perhaps extinction risk is high, but will stay high indefinitely, in which case in expectation we do not have a very long future ahead of us, and the grounds for thinking that extinction risk reduction is of enormous value fall away.

If you're attending the Leaders Forum or are a 'key figure in EA', you're probably an EA, even if you don't admit it to yourself.

How much of this advice is generally applicable outside the US?

Indeed not. I think that trying to appeal to those who chase prestige selects against truth-seeking and altruism, and I don’t think merely focusing on top unis has that effect. I’m responding to the part of the post about appealing to prestige chasers.

I believe the connection (which might or might not directly pick up on something you are defending?) is that if you go beyond merely starting your student community building with top universities first as a heuristic, and you further concentrate spending on the top universities to extreme degrees, you are in fact assuming a very strong distinction between those universities. David T has described the distinction in an approximate way as saying there are ‘only’ influential/high-earning-potential people at top universities.

The assumption of a strong distinct... (read more)

I’ve never affiliated with a university group. I’m sad to hear that at least some university groups seem to be trying to appeal to ambitious prestige-chasers, and I hope it’s not something that the CEA Groups team has applied generally. I wonder if it comes from a short-sighted strategy of trying to catch those who are most likely to end up in powerful positions in the future, which would be in line with the reasons there has been a focus on the most prestigious universities. I call it short-sighted because filling the next generation of your movement with people who are light on values and strong on politics seems like a certain way to kill what’s valuable about EA (such as commitments to altruism and truth-seeking).

Many of the questions ask you to pick among 'Strongly disagree' through 'Strongly agree' and most questions are optional. For those likert/select-an-option questions, I guess the survey analysers would do more aggregation among survey-takers, so quantity would matter there.

For context, Kirsten has long worked for UK government departments.

No. It just has a question ‘Where are you based in the UK?’, with an option to say ‘not UK-based’ and specify where you are.

Grayden comments:

I think generally they are looking for issues to consider rather than doing a straw poll of public opinion, hence quality over quantity

Yes; that Google doc is linked to as the call to action of the linked post :)

Emile is often the source for articles on EA in the media. (link to duplicate comment in other subthread, with examples)

Unfortunately, that's not a viable strategy. Emile is often the source for articles on EA in the media. Here are three examples from the guardian.

I get a ‘comment not found’ response to your link.

I think you should speak to Naming What We Can https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/54R2Masg3C9g2GxHq/announcing-naming-what-we-can-1

Though I think these days they go by ‘CETACEANS’ (the Centre for Effectively, Transparently, Accurately, Clearly, Effectively, and Accurately Naming Stuff).

Maybe I misunderstood you.

I think AIM doesn’t constitute evidence for this. Your top hypothesis should be that they don’t think AI safety is that good of a cause area, before positing the more complicated explanation. I say this partly based on interacting with people who have worked at AIM.

Sorry, it is so confusing to refer to AIM as 'A.I.', particularly in this context...

AIM simply doesn't rate AI safety as a priority cause area. It's not any particular organisation's job to work on your favourite cause area. They are allowed to have a different prioritisation from you.

To contextualize the final point I made, it seems that in fact there is a lot of criminality among the ultra rich. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/d8nW46LrTkCWdjiYd/rates-of-criminality-amongst-giving-pledge-signatories (No comment on how malicious it is)

@Jan-Willem 

I don't think it's productive to name just one or two of the very many biases one could bring up. I would need some reason to think this bias is more worth mentioning than other biases (such as Ben's payment to Alice and Chloe, or commenters' friendships, etc.).

Edit: I misread what you were saying. I thought you were saying 'Kat has dodged questions about whether it was true', and 'It's not clear the anecdotes are being presented as real'.

Actually, Kat said it was true.

I just mean one shouldn't end up in a situation where you're claiming nobody should do X, having just done X. That would be deeply weird of one.

I phrased that poorly, please see my reply to Vlad's reply for an explanation.

I weakly think Ben's decision to search for bad information rather than good was a good policy, but that the investigation was lacking in some other aspects.

Can you point out where the poem is in the very long post?

I read the author's intention, when she makes the case for 'forgiveness as a virtue', as a bid to (1) seem more virtuous herself, and (2) make others more likely to forgive her (since she was so generous to her accusers - at least in that section - and we want to reciprocate generosity). I think this is an effective persuasive writing technique, but is not relevant to the questions at issue (who did what).

Another related 'persuasive writing' technique I spotted was that, in general, Kat is keen to phrase the hypothesis where Nonlinear did bad things in an ... (read more)

Retaliation is bad. If you think doing X is bad, then you shouldn't do X, even if you're 'only doing it to make the point that doing X is bad'.

Thanks, really helpful to have this overview, makes me more likely to read the sequence itself (partly by directing me to which parts cover what)

On the wiki:

It seems like 'topics' are trying to serve at least two purposes: linking to wiki articles with info to orient people, and classifying/tagging forum posts. These purposes don't need to be so tied together as they currently are.

One could want to have e.g. 3 classification labels to help subdivide a topic (I think we currently have 'AI safety', 'AI risks', and 'AI alignment'), but that seems like a bad reason to write 3 separate similar articles, which duplicates effort in cases where the topics have a lot of overlap.

A lot of writing time could be saved if tags and wiki articles were split out such that closely related tags could point to the same wiki article.

Seems like these 'topics' are trying to serve at least two purposes: providing wiki articles with info to orient people, and classifying/tagging forum posts. These purposes don't need to be so tied together as they currently are. One could want to have e.g. 3 classification labels ('safety', 'risks', 'alignment'), but that seems like a bad reason to write 3 separate articles, which duplicates effort in cases where the topics have a lot of overlap.

A lot of writing time could be saved if tags/topics and wiki articles were split out such that closely related tags/topics could point to the same wiki article.

does OpenPhil accept donations? I would have guessed not

One can submit new features here: https://www.swapcard.com/product-roadmap

I just submitted what you said.

"After the event, we plan to publish a summary of the survey responses."