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leillustrations🔸

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This is great! I think its extremely important and underrated (dare I say 'neglected'?) work to identify and shift resources towards more effective charities in smaller contexts, even if those charities are unlikely to be the most globally effective.

Are you able to share more of your analysis or data? I'm curious about the proportion of charities in the categories you identify above, and what, if any numerical/categorical values you assigned.

Upvoted because -50 karma strikes me as excessive for a joke (even if in poor taste)

  • Presentations from any of the individuals who work on evaluation, getting "into the weeds" of how decisions are made, and recent work
  • Presentations from Givewell grantees on what they're currently working on
  • Bill / Melinda Gates, or otherwise someone from the Gates foundation
  • Elon Musk, or people from Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX
  • People from pharmaceutical companies
  • Board members of EVF
  • Sal Khan
  • A talk from successful edutainment/social media people who discuss EA-adjacent ideas like CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, etc. (who did not necessarily start out EA-funded)
  • Podcast interviewers who discuss EA-relevant content, eg. Ezra Klein (as already mentioned), Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan.
  • People running non-cause area EA interest groups, eg. SEADS, High Impact [Engineers, Law, Professionals, Medicine, etc], Religious EA groups, on what they're working on/how EA is different in their communities

I suspect you would get a much wider applicant pool for EAGxSingapore if it were a week later.

The time requirements (<10 hours/week for most roles for most of the process, then full-time the week of the conference) is not really viable for most working professionals, and more suited to students who would be on winter break - but it looks like NUS (Singapore), Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University (Phillipines), and Fulbright University (Vietnam), ie. the (I think) majority of the EA university groups in South East Asia, have school terms going up to the week of the conference.

If we are correct about the risk of AI, history will look kindly upon us (assuming we survive).

Perhaps not. It could be more like Y2K, where some believe problems were averted only by a great deal of effort and others believe there would have been minimal problems anyway.

I sometimes downvote comments and posts mostly because I think they have "too much" karma - comments and posts I might upvote or not vote on if they had less karma. As I look at the comment now it has 2 karma with 11 votes - maybe at some point it had more and people voted it back to 2?

I would have downvoted this comment if it had more karma because I think Deborah's comment can be read as antagonistic: "utterly blind", "dire state", "for heaven's sake!", calling people ignorant. In this context I didn't read it this way, but I often vote based on "what would the forum be like if all comments were more like this" rather than "what intentions do I think this person has".

Hi Deborah, I also disagree with this comment (and have disagree voted but not downvoted it). Here are some of my reasons:

  • Without getting too much into it, I think the concerns with the population growth/technological change trend are somewhat distinct from problems relating to the current population size of the earth. One can be concerned that the population replacement rate is dropping too fast while also thinking that the current global population is too large.
  • I think that, while the summarised breakdown you have under the overpopulation project link you have can be understood as broadly true (the specific link is broken), its imprecise, and the real picture is much more complicated. My understanding is that many estimate the carrying capacity of the earth to be 10 billion. If this estimate is true, then "large population, ecological sustainability and high human development" is possible if we define "large population" to be "8-10 billion people" and the other two factors in the same way that those who made the estimates defined them. I also think this picture does not consider the micro effects of aging populations, and papers over the important fact that the welfare of people in the least developed areas is not bottlenecked by planetary boundaries but the distribution of resources. Many effective altruists (myself included) also take a longtermist view which looks to expand sentient life beyond the earth.
  • You present biodiversity and "balance" as ultimate goals, while I primarily think of the former as an instrumental goal and the latter as often ill-defined.
  • I'm concerned about the long-run effects of the people most concerned with these issues collectively choosing to not have children. See discussion here.
  • It's not clear that human incursion into animal habitats is net-negative for wild animal welfare. See discussion here.

I also think it is unfair to call the post 'utterly blind to the dire state of the biosphere and the existential risks we are creating for our species by pushing beyond the planetary boundaries'. Rather I think these concerns are outside the scope of this post. 

I think having a separate section for community posts has greatly improved my experience of the forum. However I think there are still quite a lot of posts that stay on the front page for a long time for similar reasons to why community posts did - because they '[interest] everyone at least a little bit' and/or are 'accessible to everyone, or on topics where everyone has an opinion'

I want to see posts that do things like present the results of significant work get more attention, and to a lesser extent posts that are topical - i.e. announcements about recent news, events, and achievements also get more attention. I think these posts suffer from not having either of the above properties.

Could have filters/tags that promote these posts? 

I imagine there could be a useful office in a city with ~20 people using it regularly and ~100 people interested enough in EA to come to some events, and I wouldn't think of that city as an "EA hub".

I also think eg. a London office has much more value than an eg. an Oxford or Cambridge office (although I understand all three to be hubs), even though Oxford and Cambridge have a higher EA-density.

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