All of Morgan's Comments + Replies

I should clarify that "particularly bad" should be "unusually bad", and by "unusually" I mean "unusual by the standards of human behavior in other professional/intellectual communities".

If someone writes an article about the murder epidemic in New York City, and someone else points out that the NYC murder rate is not at all unusual by U.S. standards, and that murder tends to be common throughout human society, is that a trivializing thing to say?

You can believe a lot of things at once:

• Murder is terrible
• 433 murders is 433 too many
• Murderers should be removed

Furthermore, if a community wants to command billions of dollars and exert major influence on one of the world's most important industries, it is both totally predictable and appropriate that society will scrutinize that community more rigorously and hold it to a higher standard than a group of "NPCs".

edit: typo

Sorry for the delay, others seem to have given a lot of good responses in the meantime, but here is my current summary of those concerns:

1. Ideally, yes. If there is a lack of externally transparent evidence, there should be strong reasoning in favor of the grant.

By word-count the HPMOR writeup is (I think) among the three longest writeups that I produced for this round of grant proposals. I think my reasoning is sufficiently strong, though it is obviously difficult for me to comprehensively explain all of my background models and reasoning in a way that ... (read more)

I think this comment suggests there's a wide inferential gap here. Let me see if I can help bridge it a little.

If the goal is to teach Math Olympiad winners important reasoning skills, then I question this goal. They just won the Math Olympiad. If any group of people already had well developed logic and reasoning skills, it would be them. I don’t doubt that they already have a strong grasp of Bayes’ rule.

I feel fairly strongly that this goal is still important. I think that the most valuable resource that the EA/rationality/LTF community has is the ab... (read more)

Dear Morgan,

In this comment I want to address the following paragraph (related to #2).

If the goal is to encourage Math Olympiad winners to join the Effective Altruism community, why are they being given a book that has little explicitly to do with Effective Altruism? The Life You Can Save, Doing Good Better, and _80,000 Hours_are three books much more relevant to Effective Altruism than Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality. Furthermore, they are much cheaper than the $43 per copy of HPMOR. Even if one is to make the argument that HPMOR is more effec

Dear Morgan,

In this comment I want to address the following paragraph (#3).

I also want to point out that the fact that EA Russia has made oral agreements to give copies of the book before securing funding is deeply unsettling, if I understand the situation correctly. Why are promises being made in advance of having funding secured? This is not how a well-run organization or movement operates. If EA Russia did have funding to buy the books and this grant is displacing that funding, then what will EA Russia spend the original $28,000 on? This information is

Thanks for your long critique! I will try to respond to as much of it as I can.

As I see it, there are four separate claims in your comment, each of which warrants a separate response:

1. The Long-Term Future Fund should make all of its giving based on a high standard of externally transparent evidence

2. Receiving HPMoRs is unlikely to cause the math olympiad participants to start working on the long-term future, or engage with the existing EA community

3. EA Russia has made an oral promise of delivering HPMoRs without having secured external funding first

4... (read more)