All of Lukas Trötzmüller's Comments + Replies

Related: this quote from the FAQ on their website

We encourage people to do both: support charities now AND support their futures. When you support charities directly, they will spend your money directly. The difference with Give For Good is that with us, your one-time donation results in a stable income for the charity year in, year out.

"They will spend your money directly" - seems like a strong statement, makes it sounds like charities usually do not invest any of the money they receive. Is that true? I don't know, just flagging this for further discussion.

Thanks for sharing about your initiative. I do have some significant doubts about this project.

Have you interviewed charities and asked them whether they prefer donations through your scheme vs donations made directly to them?

Is there a chance that this project has negative impact, by cannibalizing direct donations and turning them into indirect donations via your platform - potentially against the will of the charities themselves, i.e., against their judgement that they could have more impact with direct donations?

Or alternatively, looking at the opposite... (read more)

Related: There is EA the actual movement, and EA the philosophy. I wonder how much we are losing out on by not having a clear line between the two. Maybe internally this distinction can be carefully navigated, but to an outsider it is one and the same. I wonder if that might be one of the things that could be improved about EA.

I imagine it feels challenging to share that and I applaud you for that.

While my EA experiences have been much more positive than yours, I do not doubt your account. For many of the points you mention, I can see milder versions in my own experience. I believe your post points towards something important.

Not if this just destroys momentum towards sustainable funding for AI safety and other longtermist causes.

Strongly disagree-voted because "I wish they had sat down" doesn't address the publicly stated reason why Binance pulled out. It makes it seem like they had no good reason, and a good conversation would have fixed the issues. Without knowing much, this seems implausible to me.

Also, I consider "I don't think he did anything in bad faith" to be somewhat irresponsible. If SBF actually did something wrong, then EAs going around and supporting him by saying "I don't think he did anything wrong" will hurt the optics of this further.

Curious why this is getting downvoted. It seems like another initiative in the Applied Rationality space, which sounds quite useful to me.

While I'm personally not interested in the bootcamp, I am curious if the people who downvoted have specific criticism or reservations about the program.

I frequently catch myself, and I'm embarrassed to admit that, being more likely to upvote posts of users that I know. I also find myself anchoring my vote to the existing vote count (if a post has a lot of upvotes then I am less likely to downvote it). Pretty sure I'm not the only one.

Furthermore, I observe how vote count influences my reading of each post more than it should. Groupthink at its best.

I suspect if the forum hid the vote count for a month, there would be significant changes in voting patterns. That being said, I'm not sure these changes would actually influence the votesorted order of the postings - but they might. I suspect it would also change the nature of certain discussions.

In order to make this even remotely plausible, the rules for tax deductible charities would need to be far more stringent. And then you get a situation like we currently have in Austria, where not a single EA-aligned charity is tax-deductible at all.

Nevertheless it does send a certain signal to the public. The way things look is important, especially when it comes to completely legal ways to circumvent taxes - where intent plays a role.

The justification of crypto regulation requires background information that outside observers don't have. Also, it's impossible to judge from the outside whether or not tax savings was one of the arguments considered in addition to the regulatory situation.

There is no extreme poverty or starvation in democratic countries

This seems like a strong claim to me. What's your source for that?

and access to education and health care is one hundred percent, at least in older democracies. Younger ones are getting there fast.

Where do you draw the line between older and younger democracies? Isn't the US pretty old compared to other democracies [1] - and does it provide "100% access to health care" to its citizens?

all countries and all people lived in democracies the major problems of humanity would be solved or

pretty much generally agreed upon in the EA community that the development of unaligned AGI is the most pressing problem

While there is significant support for "AI as cause area #1", I know plenty of EAs that do not agree with this. Therefore, "generally agree upon" feels like a bit too strong of a wording to me. See also my post on why EAs are skeptical about AI safety

For viewpoints from professional AI researchers, see Vael Gates interviews with AI researchers on AGI risk.

I mention those pieces not to argue that AI risk is overblown, but rather to shed... (read more)

I found myself confused about the quotes, and would have liked to hear a bit more where they came from. Are these verbatim quotes from disillusioned EAs you talked to? Or are they rough reproductions? Or completely made up?

The sample is biased in many ways: Because of the places where I recruited, interviews that didn't work out because of timezone difference, people who responded too late, etc. I also started recruiting on Reddit and then dropped that in favour of Facebook.

So this should not be used as a representative sample, rather it's an attempt to get a wide variety of arguments.

I did interview some people who are worried about alignment but don't think current approaches are tractable. And quite a few people who are worried about alignment but don't think it should ge... (read more)

I'm not quite sure I read the first two paragraphs correctly. Are you saying that Cotra, Carlsmith and Bostrom are the best resources but they are not widely recommended? And people mostly read short posts, like those by Eliezer, and those are accessible but might not have the right angle for skeptics?

I'm a software entrepreneur transitioning into higher-impact ventures. Had a mentoring call with Yonatan a couple of months ago. What I really liked about his approach was the structure of the call: First, gathering an overview of the issues of the table. Second, going through them in a fast-forward kind of way. And third, figuring out which ones are the most important to talk about.

The outcomes of the call directly led into the next steps I needed to explore this path.

The fact that he asked for feedback at the end of the call shows me that Yonatan is seri... (read more)

Would you say that inexperienced people benefit less from a Mastermind than experienced people? Or would you say that they benefit so little that a Mastermind is not worth for them?

If your claim is that Masterminds are only worthwhile for experienced people, then I disagree for two reasons:

First, the way I see Masterminds, one core aspect is that a group of peers can be much more effective in thinking through problems than a single individual. This is true even if none of my peers have any experience that I don't have. It is surely not true for any imagina... (read more)

I believe a documentary could be a great vehicle to explain EA and get people interested.

Obviously it would need to explain EA principles. But there is also room to include emotion and personal stories. Which might be much more important, in terms of the effect on the viewer.

Perhaps the emotion and personal stories could make up more than half of the film. One documentary that does this really well is "Chasing Ice". It's about James Balog, a photographer documenting climate change by filming glaciers. The film presents the science in a clear way, but it's... (read more)

Which roles specifically seem net-negative to you?

A new report from Founders Pledge just came out - although it's just an overview article and doesn't go into much depth. https://founderspledge.com/stories/changing-landscape

Relevant work demonstrating bright full-room lighting as an alternative to an SAD lamp: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bwhDhZQvbEcG4FEb8/preprint-is-out-100-000-lumens-to-treat-seasonal-affective

Yes, that's what it is. "We" as in "the author and the reader". There is no co-author or organization involved in this.

I like your post because it puts some more backstory behind an argument that many people usually accept for face value.

I don't quite understand this argument:

If we can geoengineer or capture enough to offset 60% of our emissions in 2030, and then in 2031 we reduce our emissions by 1% (as measured at the smokestack), then the environmental damage will not fall from 40% to 39.6%, it will fall to 39%. So it's still a one-percentage-point change whether or not we do geoengineering and carbon dioxide removal.

This assumes that geoengineering will cause effec... (read more)

relevant: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ucjaZFNrebZdZAnb9/impact-investing-is-only-a-good-idea-in-specific and https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Rkr2W8ADSGwWXfRBF/effective-impact-investing

The AMA recording is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qNfhG6pTZvM

Crowdsourced notes: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1DNPhrj6rfD8C3K2rfNvhP48Z0XaI91aq4McuV_umL2k/edit#heading=h.fnqw4893e1db

The most interesting part of your post, to me, is your risk model [1]. I would be curious to hear some more feedback from other people on it.

I turned it into a Guesstimate, making some adjustments to some of the numbers and using population figures from Austria [2].

[1] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1A0jcxj4n0BvNt_jMunHT5WSsAKFzuVJJyaaqcK9Z1HU/edit#

[2] https://www.getguesstimate.com/models/15367

Thanks for the explanation on extreme individual precautions, that made things clearer.

I'm curious what you're thinking of when you say "adopt measures that can plausibly be sustained for one year or even longer"?

I'm thinking of simple, low-cost changes to habits and my living environment that reduce chances of infection with Coronavirus and other illnesses. For example: improving personal hygiene practices (how to handle laundry, when to desinfect hands, how to keep the kitchen super clean, desinfecting electronic devices), chan... (read more)

You mention exponential spread, working from home, and avoiding travelling after March.

But what is the endgame here? How long do we need to stop travelling for? Should we apply these measures, as far as possible, starting in April and keep them up until a vaccine is available in 1-2 years? Will the number of cases level off eventually?

I assume there is no scientific consensus on these questions. If the virus is here to stay, then there might be little value in adopting extreme individual precautions for just one or two months. Afterwards, when you stop tak... (read more)

You could use the donation swap system at EAHub: https://donationswap.eahub.org