All of Paul_Lang's Comments + Replies

Hi @Leandro Franz thank you very much for this post. I'd be curious to have a look at your document or a summarized version of it. Could you double check the link to the document? It does not work for me.

I am wondering if 80k should publicly speak of the PINT instead of the INT framework (with P for personal fit). This is because I get the impression that the INT framework contributes to generating a reputation hierarchy of cause areas to work on; and many (young) EAs tend to over-emphasize reputation over personal fit, which basically sets them up for failure a couple of years down the line. Putting the "P" in there might help to avoid this.

Is there any evidence that translation efforts are effective to reach people who do not have English as their first language? My impression is that native German speakers <35 years with a university degree understand written English perfectly well, although some prefer German. Listening and especially speaking can be a bit more challenging. As a rule of thumb, the younger the person, the better their English (due to YouTube, Netflix, etc.).

Good to hear that there are EAs working on that within governments.

Thanks for sharing your insights Mako! After reading your response and the IEEE Spectrum article you mentioned, I am much more optimistic that the metaverse can/will move in the right direction. Is there anything that could be done (by governments, companies, NGOs, the general public, or whatever player) to make this even more likely?

I also liked your example of Twitter, where addictiveness was not designed into the system, but happened accidentally. Accidents usually prompt investigations to improve regulations, for instance in the aircraft industry. Do y... (read more)

To me that sounds like a project that could be listed on https://www.eawork.club/ . I once listed to translate the German Wikipedia article for Bovine Meat and Milk Factors into English cause I did not have the rights to do it. A day later somebody had it done. And in the meanwhile somebody apparently translated it to Chinese.

Regarding media: to keep track of media coverage and potentially react accordingly, it seems that https://www.google.com/alerts can be helpful.

I agree with your statement that "The message of the post is that specific impact investments can pass a high effectiveness bar"

But when you say >>I think the message of this post isn't that compatible with general claims like "investing is doing good, but donating is doing more good".<< I think I must have been misled by the decision matrix. To me it suggested this comparison between investment and donation, while not being able to resolve a difference between the columns "Pass & Invest to Give", "Pass & Give now" (and a hypothetical c... (read more)

Thanks for the response. My issue was just that the money flow from the customer to the investor was accounted as positive for the investor, but not negative for the customer. I see the argument that customers are reasonably well off non-EAs whereas the investor is an EA. I am not sure if it can be used to justify the asymmetry in the accounting.

Perhaps it would make sense that an EA investor is only 10% altruistic and 90% selfish (somewhat in line with the 10% GW pledge)? The conclusion of that would be that investing is doing good, but donating is doing more good.

I would have thought that this is magnitudes easier,  because (with exception of my last sentence) this uses existing technology (although, AFAIK the artificial ecosystems we tried to create on earth failed after some time, so maybe there is a bit more fine-tuning needed). Whereas we still seem to be far away to understand humans or upload them to computers. But in the end, perhaps we would not want to colonise space with a rocket like structure, but with the lightest stuff we can possibly built do to relativistic mass increase. Who knows. The lightweight argument would certainly work in favour of the upload to computer solution.

From an impartial perspective, I think it is also necessary to account for the wallet of the customer, not only of the investor. After all, the only reason why the investor gets their money back, is that customers are paying for the product.

In other words,  one could add a row "Financial loss customer" to the decision matrix. For the "Pass & Give Now" Column it would be 0% (there is customer who pays the investor back). For all other columns it would be 100%, I think. That is, once the customers wallet is taken into account, the best world would b... (read more)

I really enjoyed this podcast. But regarding space colonization, I do not think that uploading humans to computers is the only alternative to avoid transporting human colonies in space ships. For instance, we could send facilities for producing nutrition, oxygen and human artificial wombs there, plus two tiny test tubes of undamaged egg and sperm cells. Of course, once synthetic biology gives us the ability to create cells ourselves, we can also upload the human (epi)genome to a storage medium and synthetize the DNA and zygotes on the new planet.

Did anyone else use Google Pay? Didn't seem to incur fees for me.

Love to hear that there is important work being done in that area! Are there approaches to measure SWB as a function of "objective" well-being (OWB)? And what are their shortcomings? For instance, to me it feels that SWB could be a weighted sum of OWB the recent change in OWB and how one's own (x) OWB compares to the OWB of others (x_i):

The weights are probably person specific parameters. Persons with low w1 and w2 might be resilient, persons with high w2 might like status symbols,  etc.

OK, I realised the flaw in my argumentation. If I have 1000 GBP to give away, I could either 'walk' 1000 GBP in direction of charity x or 1000 GBP in direction of charity y but only sqrt(x^2 + y^2) in a combination of x and y, e.g. the maximal gradient. The optimal allocation (x, y) of money is what maximises the scalar product of gradient (dU/dx, dU/dy) * (x, y) under the restriction that x + y = 1000. If dU/dx = dU/dy a 50/50 allocation as good as an allocation of all money to the most effective charity. Otherwise giving all money to the most effective charity maximises utility. Sorry for the confusion and thanks for the discussion.

No, I am not trying to account for uncertainty.

But look for instance at this or this picture and assume it shows utility z as function of the budget of two charities x and y. For almost every point (x, y), the steepest slope is in neither in direction (0, 1) nor in direction (1, 0) but in a combination of both direction. In other words, to optimize utility, I should give part of my money to charity x, part to charity y.

Thank you both for your answer. I am really just thinking of marginal utility, as I am just a student with limited budget. I just do not think that the vector the maximizes marginal utility points in the direction of the most efficient charity (which I thought is true a few weeks ago). Now I think it should point in the direction of the gradient of U(x1, ..., xn), the utility as function of the budget of charities x1 to xn. That is, it points in the direction of many charities, and I should split my spendings accordingly between the charities to maximise the benefit (assuming negligible overhead costs of splitting).