I do independent research on EA topics. I write about whatever seems important, tractable, and interesting (to me). Lately, I mainly write about EA investing strategy, but my attention span is too short to pick just one topic.
I have a website: https://mdickens.me/ Most of the content on my website gets cross-posted to the EA Forum.
My favorite things that I've written: https://mdickens.me/favorite-posts/
I used to work as a software developer at Affirm.
I think this is the comment you're thinking of: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jAfhxWSzsw4pLypRt/where-i-am-donating-in-2024?commentId=y6evejGaj4TMApozC
Vasco's corpus of cost-effectiveness estimates
Are you talking about this post? Looks like those cost-effectiveness estimates were written by Ambitious Impact so I don't know if there are some other estimates written by Vasco.
I do think there's concern with a popular movement that the movement will move in a direction you didn't want, but empirically this has already happened for "behind closed doors" lobbying so I don't think a popular movement can do worse.
There's also an argument that a popular movement would be too anti-AI and end up excessively delaying a post-AGI utopia, but I discussed in my post why I don't think that's a sufficiently big concern.
(I agree with you, I'm just anticipating some likely counter-arguments)
Quick thoughts on investing for transformative AI (TAI)
Some EAs/AI safety folks invest in securities that they expect to go up if TAI happens. I rarely see discussion of the future scenarios where it makes sense to invest for TAI, so I want to do that.
My thoughts aren't very good, but I've been sitting on a draft for three years hoping I develop some better thoughts and that hasn't happened, so I'm just going to publish what I have. (If I wait another 3 years, we might have AGI already!)
Scenarios where investing doesn't work:
Scenarios where investing works:
(Money seems much more valuable in scenario #5 than #6.)
What is the probability that we end up in a world where investing for TAI turns out to work? I don't think it's all that high (maybe 25%, although I haven't thought seriously about this).
You also need to be correct about your investing thesis, which is hard. Markets are famously hard to beat.
I spent some time looking into this since it was not obvious to me how to buy from Perfect Day. Looks like the only retail partner who sells their whey protein powder is Myprotein, most retailers sell things like ice cream.
Updated to include the new fee schedule. I decided not to update the flowchart because, although Charityvest is no longer cheaper than Schwab, I still like it better because it has lower fees on the default investment funds.