Also, if Wytham were a legally separate entity, pretty detailed information would have to be released as a matter of course on Charity Commission filing (UK) or on the Form 990 (US). So, I don't think I view asking for ~ that level of information separated out for a financially significant project as a huge departure from normal practice.
This seems like a pretty weak argument to me. If Apple was to spin off its Apple Watch business as a separate publicly traded company, that new firm would have to release pretty detailed financial information. But because ...
I think EAs spend a lot of time thinking about things. They think about things because EAs want to be smart, and smart people spend lots of time thinking. That’s why EAs make enourmous google docs, substacks, tweet a lot, go on forums and become researchers.
This seems false to me. People spend a lot of time thinking about things because they want to come to the right answer, not because they are cargo-culting what smart people do. In fact EAs probably spend more time thinking about things than typical smart people do.
How many talks are you expecting to have? These seem very prescriptive, and things like multiple 1% categories will be difficult to achieve if you have <100 talks. I would worry that a strict focus on distribution like this would lead to having to sacrifice quality.
I think a place where there is a disconnect is that these PF basically think being EA-aligned means you have to be a major pain in the ass to your grantees.
The more I think about this, the more strange it seems to me. At least for the grant-making processes I'm familiar with, there is very little burden on the applicants/grantees. They will in a short (by the standards of grant applications) form that indicates what information is required, maybe answer a few follow-up questions (or maybe not) and then get the money with very few follow-ups. In contrast my...
For people not clicking through the first link, I thought this youtube video was pretty impressive: almost a hundred years of leading politicians claiming that each election is the or one of the most important elections of our lives / the century / all time.
I have had cybersecurity issues and have been advised to be more careful about clicking on unfamiliar links and to avoid certain forums.
Someone told you not to go on lesswrong for cybersecurity reasons?
Would it be possible to analogously execute adults by injection into the heart if this was a more humane method?
I'm surprised you think that low, especially considering the President often will have been a Senator or Governor or top businessman before office, so the longer average term in Congress is not a big advantage.
...For instance, most people will probably put the US president into the category “high-impact individual.” And there are certainly many impactful things the president can do that are not accessible to most other people. But for achieving most goals that can be said to really matter - a better healthcare system that actually improves wellbeing in the country; effective technology policy that actually reduces risks and/or advances life-improving technological developments; a sufficient response to the climate crisis; etc. - presidents themselves will tell you
I would prefer the US be stronger relative to its adversaries (Russia, China etc.) so the direct effects of working in defense seem positive to me.
Thanks for writing this, a pleasure to read as always.
I must admit I come away being rather confused by what you mean by 'wholesomeness'. Is wholesomeness basically consequentialism but with more vibes and less numbers? Your account makes it seem quite close to consequentialism. It also seems really close to virtue ethics - you try to differentiate it by saying it rejects "focus[ing] single-mindedly on excelling at one virtue" but my impression was that virtue ethics was all about balance the golden median anyway. And then it seems pretty close to sincerit...
This seems like an isolated demand for rigour. When Hormel employees and other associated people gave $500k to an end-of-life care charity - a donation which is part of Lewis's data - I don't think this was a secret scheme to increase beef consumption. (I'm not really sure why it's captured in this data at all actually). People who work in agriculture aren't some sort of evil caricature who only donate money to oppose animal protection; a lot of their donations are probably motivated by the same concerns that motivate everyone else.
Wait - did vegans and animal rights groups really donate approximately $0 to political donations (at least in 2020)?
Surely SBF count[s/ed] as a vegan and an animal rights guy? He alone donated over $5m to Biden.
Thanks for writing this up and sharing it.
Do you have a good account for when counting arguments do and do not work? My impression is they often do work in everyday life, or at least can provide a good prior to be updated away from. Like if I'm wondering who I will meet first when I go into school, a counting argument correctly predicts that any single specific person is quite unlikely. Is the idea that humans are typically good at ontology dividing, such that each of the options are roughly equivalent, but this intuition doesn't work well for SGD?
Thanks for writing this.
I was curious about this claim, because I was not sure what the intended causal mechanism would be:
Taking parental leave shorter than 1 month does not mitigate productivity losses, but parental leave longer than 1 month and less than 12 months correlated with an 11%–17% productivity[2] improvement
But when I look at the chart in the citation it makes it look like <1 month leave does typically have positive impacts?
I'm surprised you object so strenuously to taking the log of GNI/Capita or GDP/capita. This to me seems like a very natural thing to do, given the diminishing marginal utility of money, and the nature of the distribution of national incomes. If you don't take logs (or similar) your model will presumably be quite insensitive to the differences between really poor and really really poor. Indeed, I note you yourself use log GDP as the independent variable in a chart on the very next page (p17).
Thanks for sharing. I didn't quite understand the methodology in the paper (e.g. why 4.1 degrees as baseline? and I saw 0.29 as the total lifetime impact, rather than 1.16) but either way it seems to agree that the post's implicit estimates were way too high.
...In this case, the example is no longer hypothetical as an individual who changes his habits to reduce carbon emissions is literally saving not one but many children who are at risk of drowning from floods caused by rising global temperatures, among other disasters caused by global warming. Thus, there is strong support for the second premise. The actions an individual can take to reduce the carbon emissions of his consumption habits are simple and at little cost to the individual. These actions include switching off electrical appliances when not in use, u
Dumb suggestion: is there any way you could find someone in Germany who needed one and then make a directed donation? Maybe there is a Facebook group or Reddit for such people.
But I think there's a fundamental problem with that approach: in this scenario, the EVFs aren't employing anyone! They are deciding whether or not to make grants of EVF assets and IP to wholly independent, newly formed organizations. You'd need a legal authority that made it illegal for EVF to adopt a policy of generally not making these kinds of grants to organizations whose boards were wholly lacking in certain forms of diversity.
This does not seem to be a stretch to me. Your proposed strategy would allow for widespread circumvention of anti-discri...
I think there are a number of presumptive criteria the EVF Boards could set for approval of a spin-off: ... not all men; not all White people; not all US or all UK people, etc.
This sounds like a bad idea to me. Board membership decisions should be made on the basis of merit, not discrimination. As EV/CEA previously said: "CEA is committed to building an EA community where racism is unacceptable".
In addition to being immoral, I also think this would probably be illegal. The use of racial and sex-based quotas in employment is prohibited under Title VII of th...
In addition to being immoral, I also think this would probably be illegal.
I think this would likely be legal. Your analysis is US-focused; I'm not well-versed in other jurisdictions' laws either, so I'll leave that to the side. The California case (and the UNC portion of the Harvard case) involved state action, which is absent here. Students for Fair Admission involved the Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., which "prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities rec...
I think this is sort of right - while climate change is often the main ideological reason people quote for not wanting to have children, typically personal reasons for the would-be parents come first (lifestyle, housing etc.). See for example:
...Those who do not have children and do not want to have a child in the future more often express concern about their personal situation, compared to external factors, as influencing their decisions:
- Personal independence: 54%
- Personal financial situation: 46%
- Work/life balance: 40%
- Housing prices: 33%
- Safety: 31%
- US politics
As you probably are aware, there was recently a successful EA-adjacent campaign against the Bully XL dog in the UK.
These dogs were explicitly bred from pitbulls for fighting and aggression, and as a result are very dangerous - >70% of human deaths from dog attacks were from Bullies, and they are massively over-represented among dogs seized by the police. They are estimated at below 1% of the dog population - though the recent figures suggest they are far from 1% - meaning they are more than 300x more dangerous than the typical dog population.
Despite thi...
By now I think people are well aware of the basic arguments for and against grant application feedback. To move the conversation forward it might be helpful for people to try to quantify how valuable and/or costly it would be to them. For example, if you are a grant applicant, how much lower a probability of funding would you be willing to accept in return for brief or detailed feedback? If you are a grant evaluator, how much extra time would it take to provide feedback, and how often would the feedback be so critical the applicant would likely find it unpleasant to receive?
We can safely say that their low income significantly reduces their life expectancy:
Unless I've misread it I don't think the linked article shows this? It shows they are correlated, but not how the causation goes, and there are many clear candidates for common causes. For example, having a serious medical condition might make it harder for you to work, reducing your income, and cause you to die sooner, reducing your life expectancy.
I would expect lower income to reduce life expectancy somewhat but for things like health, pollution, IQ, drug addiction, cons...
Also talk to me if you recognize this cultural offputtingness I'm talking about: I'm preparing a series of posts on diversity and AI and need to back it up as much as I can, despite the youth of the field.
The "please send me supporting anecdotes" method of evidence gathering.
Well I agree this is a better idea than that one, but I suspect it is still a bad one. For most orgs internal feedback will probably be confidential (e.g. "your project is now behind schedule, but that was mainly due to legal" clearly has information that would be potentially valuable to competitors).
But again, my primary question is the same: how often have you actually asked a hiring manager to send you their feedback? How often did they share it? What did it contain?
Very intelligent people have been working very hard on finding way to improve economic development for many years. Unlikely that outsiders on an internet forum will see neglected solutions.
This post is a list of projects that very intelligent people have been working very hard on for years that you could fund.
How many times have you requested a hiring manager do a work test for you? For what types of roles? Did you compensate them for their time?
The basic employment relationship is:
This is asymmetric because the firm's obligations are typically very fixed: they have to pay exactly $X every two weeks or they will get in a lot of trouble very quickly. In contrast, what is demanded from employees is typically a lot more nebulous. The firm can't easily know how talented the candidates are, or how hard they will work. If the perfor...
Update: the Eight Circuit has just upheld a ban in Iowa on using deception to gain employment in order to cause economic harm to the employer. So my guess is these investigations are illegal now, at least in Iowa.
In places with high childhood mortality, for example, the expected number of life-years gained from saving a relatively young adult might be higher than a baby. This is because some proportion of babies will die from various diseases early in life, whereas young adults who have "made it through" are more likely to die in old age.
I'm skeptical this consideration actually applies in practice. This argument would have applied in the past but not any more; according to OWID, Somalia has the world's highest infant mortality at 14%. So even there a young adult (...
According to the first result in Google, doctors' total pay, while significantly lower than the UK, is still significantly above the UK average, even for junior doctors. Their hourly rate is surprisingly low but that's mainly because they work very long hours.
...As a result, consultants’ basic NHS pay will be between £93,666 and £126,281, with average full-time NHS earnings likely to be around £143,100 once additional earnings are included to cover things such as on-call responsibility, medical awards, geographical allowances and additional activity.
For junio
Yes I was being sincere. I might have missed some meta thing here as obviously I'm not steeped in AI alignment. Perhaps Trevor intended to reply on another comment but mistakenly replied here?
It might help if you summarized the arguments made in the video or, ideally, shared a transcript.
I think it's worth not entangling the word 'censorship' with whether it is justified. During the Second World War the UK engaged in a lot of censorship, to maintain domestic morale and to prevent the enemy from getting access to information, but this seems to me to have been quite justified, because the moral imperative for defeating Germany was so great.
Similarly, it seems quite possible to me that in the future CEA might be quite justified in instituting AI-related censorship, preventing people from publishing writing that disagrees with the house line. ...
It seems possible to me that the FTX and EV related censorship was justified, though it is hard to tell, given that EV have never really explained their reasons, and I think the policy certainly had very significant costs.
I think it is highly likely that imposing a preclearance requirement on employees was justified. It would be extremely difficult for an attorney to envision everything that an employee might conceivably write and determine without even seeing it whether it would cause problem. Even if the attorney could, they would have to update th...
...In the 20 years of the Soviet programme, with all the caveats that we don’t fully know what the programme was, but from the best reading of what we know from the civil side of that programme, they really didn’t get that far in creating agents that actually meet all of those criteria [necessary for usefulness in biological warfare]. They got somewhere, but they didn’t get to the stage where they had a weapon that changed their overall battlefield capabilities; that would change the outcome of a war, or even a battle, over the existing weapon systems availab
Great point about the counterfactual for the funding, I should have thought of it and included in the post in the first place. Thanks a lot for sharing this great comment!
Interesting argument about 'side effects' vs 'externalities'. I was assuming that organizations/individuals were being 'selfishly' rational, and assuming that a relatively small fraction of things like the field-building effects would benefit the specific organization doing the field-building. But 'side effects' does seem like it might be more accurate, so possibly I should adjust the title.
Hey Howie, over ten months later I still don't see anything on the website. (Unless I am just unusually bad at reading websites). Was this followed up on?
Good question! That was my interpretation of this, since if all the projects are offboarded I do not see what is left:
...... we are planning to take significant steps to decentralize the effective altruism ecosystem by offboarding the projects which currently sit under the Effective Ventures umbrella. This means CEA, 80,000 Hours, Giving What We Can and other EV-sponsored projects will transition to being independent legal entities, with their own leadership, operational staff, and governance structures. We anticipate the details of the offboarding proce
As a follow-up, this recent NBER paper on people who receive unexpected cash windfalls in Sweden rejected the idea that poverty was the main causal factor behind poor people committing crimes at a higher rate; their non-significant point estimate was in fact that wealth transfers increased crime (though this could easily be noise). It would be good if we could contrast it with the GiveDirectly result, to see if the different environment (random vs predictable, Sweden vs Kenya) made a significant difference.
Nitpick: I think this is a linkpost not a repost since this is the first time it has been shared on the forum.