All of Markus Amalthea Magnuson's Comments + Replies

Yeah, I think a lot of people simply have not looked into how essential voluntary immigration has been for the demographics and economy of most rich countries.

Just noting for posterity that the OPs' organisation Pronatalist.org got a $482,000 grant from the Survival & Flourishing Fund in the second 2022 round: https://survivalandflourishing.fund/sff-2022-h2-recommendations

Thank you for the kind words.

I think the JS alert was caused by my ad blockers. When I turned off both uBlock Origin and Firefox's built-in one, the request was sent to Mailchimp successfully. Have not received a confirmation though which might be related to the issue you mention.

Very interesting and beautifully crafted. Just wanted to mention that your newsletter signup might have some issue, when I try to sign up I get an error alert saying "Could not connect to the registration server. Please try again later.".

I just find it funny how posting something like that in a public forum will, of course, make it seen by journalists sooner or later, anyway.

It's the second bit that concerns me more because I think it's essentially a correct description of how CEA, and EAs in general (largely because of CEA's influence), view public engagement. Any interaction outside the community is seen mainly as something that should be handled through a lens of risk mitigation. The way it's phrased makes it sound like the CEA stopped 78% of 137 virus outbreaks.

Like I wrote elsewhere, ... (read more)

Imagine thinking this is a good outcome of the "keep your mouth shut" strategy CEA recommends regarding media:

Effective altruism is not a cult. As one EA advised his peers in a forum post about how to talk to journalists: “Don’t ever say ‘People sometimes think EA is a cult, but it’s not.’ If you say something like that, the journalist will likely think this is a catchy line and print it in the article. This will give readers the impression that EA is not quite a cult, but perhaps almost.”

…

Effective altruism treats public engagement as yet another dire ris

It seems very important to involve the community at all levels, including the main arena of discussions.

Additionally, delegating important community-affecting processes (and eventually, decisions) to small "expert groups" might actually be one of the mechanisms one could criticise the EA community to be over-reliant on, and that causes some of the problems in the first place.

I also wanted to point out that norm changes might not be entirely what a lot of people have in mind, but rule changes too. An important distinction.

I've spent a lot of time this year looking into this exact scenario and discussing various models with many people with different views. Most other EA agencies are trying to figure it out as well.

What is most likely is that I'll move to a hybrid model where the first X hours are free, and after that, most would pay some (below market rate) fee that is offset by larger clients that can afford market rate. The main reason for this is that my data suggests around 70% of clients would have tried to solve the issues themselves otherwise, which is a huge time wa... (read more)

Thank you for taking the time to post this reply, this is really helpful.

Thank you, Ezra, that is very kind of you.

To be frank, that was the purpose of my comment. I still think it's a reasonable prediction based on previous posts, such as those pointed out by Tyrone in the original post, not leading to meaningful mechanisms such as a formal whistleblower function within EA. But I did make the reply pointed to get a reaction, and I hope this is not construed as dishonest in any way. Judging by all the disagreement votes, the upvotes for the original post, and the discussion going on here, I hope to be very, very wrong this time.

I'm curious about this as well. Does leaving immediately not impede the chances of getting a better (I'd never dare say "full") picture of what went down? Additionally, in terms of accountability, I guess now we'll never know or have records of (from emails etc.) who knew what and when.

That a situation where they are not "absolutely sure" can even occur is one of the major causes of worry here, regardless of the conclusions that can be drawn at this point.

The FTX Future Fund recently finished a large round of regrants, meaning a lot of people are approved for grants that have not yet been paid out. At least one person has gotten word from them that these payouts are on hold for now. This seems very worrisome and suggests the legal structure of the fund is not as robust or isolated as you might have thought. I think a great community support intervention would be to get clarity on this situation and communicate it clearly. This would be helpful not only to grantees but to the EA community as a whole, since w... (read more)

I don’t have a view on that, but it would be cool if it was available as a forum setting (”Weight votes by account age”) and some people might like it better that way.

I wrote this in 2013, might be of interest to those concerned:

https://medium.com/@markus.magnuson/rigging-any-vote-based-social-website-to-keep-the-early-spirit-861e2e54e552

I plan to post my reports on LessWrong and the Effective Altruism forum

Why would posting mainly in these tiny communities be the best approach? First, I think these communities are already far more familiar with the topics you plan to publish on than the average reader. Second, they are – as I said – tiny. If you want to be a public intellectual, I think you should publish where public intellectuals generally publish. This is usually a combination of books, magazines, journals, and your own platforms (e.g. personal website/blog, social media etc.)

You could... (read more)

If you speak to a stranger about your worries of unaligned AI, they'll think you're insane (and watch too many sci-fi films).

I'm not so sure this is true. In my own experience, a correct explanation of the problem with unaligned AI makes sense to almost everyone with some minimum of reasoning skill. Although this is anecdotal, I would not be surprised if an actual survey among "strangers" would show this too.

Commenting on your general point, I think the reason is that most people's sense of when AGI could plausibly happen is "in the far future", which make... (read more)

This is very exciting and has huge potential. Please get in touch with the Altruistic Agency for tech needs (e.g. website) when you are at that point, I'd love to help.

Since sociology is probably an underrepresented degree in effective altruism, maybe you can consider it a comparative advantage rather than "the wrong degree". The way I see it, EA could use a lot more sociological inquiry.

I'm aware of this, and it raises more questions than it answers, frankly. For example, I wonder what the terms were when what was originally a grant to a non-profit, turned into (?) an investment in a for-profit.

Anti Entropy are doing a lot of work towards this in the operations area, especially for new organisations. I think a lot of the things you ask for (especially in infrastructure) is currently provided ad hoc and informally (e.g. in various invite-only Slack workspaces) or by service providers and (EA) agencies that charge for it.

Well done! If anyone would ever be interested, Nick has the transcript in Swedish here: https://nickbostrom.com/interviews/Sommarprat-P1.pdf

More views from two days ago: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9rvpLqt6MyKCffdNE/jobs-at-ea-organizations-are-overpaid-here-is-why

I especially recommend this comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9rvpLqt6MyKCffdNE/jobs-at-ea-organizations-are-overpaid-here-is-why?commentId=zbPE2ZiLGMgC7hkMf

What would be truly useful is annual (anonymous) salary statistics among EA organisations, to be able to actually observe the numbers and reason about them.

Great designs! I just have to ask… the "typo" is intentional, right?

I mentioned this in an email to you, but thought I'd leave it in a comment here as well just to make other readers aware of the initiative: BOAS does something similar, in the niche of sustainable baby and kids products. They started out fairly recently and have already donated 2,000 EUR to effective charities. I will check if Vincent who founded BOAS has an account here on the forum, and if so, ask him to make some general comments in this thread, on his experience.

A concrete follow-up question (anyone, feel free to answer it):

What do you think is the correct salary for some common roles, and why that number?

Non-profit work is systematically underpaid (and often unpaid) in relation to its value (e.g. for humanity) since market mechanisms are laughably unfit to price it properly. I think the EA community is in a great position to counteract this through a culture of high salaries, good benefits etc. and should use that opportunity. I'm happy you bring it up though, as I think there should be far more research on things like salary, incentives etc. instead of just relying on "business/market common sense" which is only fully appropriate in businesses proper, which most EA organisations are not.

Exactly! Somewhat of a sidenote but I find it relevant: I've seen this thing with many political parties in Sweden that usually have a youth organisation that for various reasons often represents a more radical version of the so-called party line on various issues. Political opponents will try to hold the party responsible for what the youth branch says and does, but it's generally understood by most (I think) that the latter is the avant-garde and should not be conflated with the general views of e.g. those voting for the party in elections. Denying there are important connections between the two would be dishonest, but so would saying they are the same be.

It should probably not even be called a work sample under the circumstances I describe, but rather just work.

For example, if I'm hiring a communicator, I could ask them to spend two hours on improving the text of a web page. That could be a typical actual work task at some point, but this "work sample" also creates immediate value. If the improvements are good, they could be published regardless of whether that person is hired or not. This is also why you would pay an applicant for those two hours.

A very simplified example, but I hope the point comes across. And like you mention, for some types of work such isolated tasks are much more prevalent.

Thank you for an excellent reply. I've for a long time found the "mastery, autonomy, purpose" concept useful and think of it as true – for lack of a better word. That these three aspects determine drive/motivation/happiness to a large extent, in a work context.

It seems to me some criticisms, including this one, paint a picture that does not very accurately describe what most effective altruists are up to in a practical sense. You could get the idea that EA is 10,000 people waking up every day thinking about esoteric aspects of AI safety, actively avoiding any other current issues regardless of scale.

In reality, a fair chunk (probably a vast majority?) do what most would perceive as "traditional" charity work, e.g. working at an organisation that tries to alleviate poverty or promote animal welfare, organising th... (read more)

Very good post. Would love to see more summaries of research on hiring but also what makes employees happy, and similar topics. A question about work samples: What are your thoughts, and what is the research, on using real (paid) work instead of work samples? Meaning, identifying some existing task that actually needs to be done, rather than coming up with an "artificial" one.

I plan to start offering this – among other things – for free through the Altruistic Agency later this year.

Why do you need a legal entity? Maybe you could describe the project/website in more concrete terms – that would make it easier to give concrete recommendations.

Just a list of projects and organisations FTX has funded would be beneficial and probably much less time-consuming to produce. Some of the things you mention could be deducted from that, and it would also help in evaluating current project ideas and how likely they are to get funding from FTX at some point.

Or test titles on an appropriate audience. For example, come up with 20 different titles, then pay 100 professional recruiters 20 dollars each to vote on which one sounds most impressive. Actually, maybe something like that could be done on an even larger scale to find out how this "career capital issue" can be improved for many EA job roles.

Work to give community builders more job security. How to do this would obviously depend on the situation at hand, but in cases where community builders are on grants one could consider longer grant periods, longer exit grants and/or support and incentives for people to start legal entities which then employ them as community builders.

I wonder if this could be, more or less, a single organisation with the main purpose of providing stability for every single community builder at once. A rather small operations team could probably streamline things like cont... (read more)

I would like the ability to sort search results by date. Often, I want to know who mentioned something in the past few weeks or months, this is currently not possible. (I'm guessing the current sort order is by magic, but there is nothing indicating this.)

I can't think of any specific links or such but I can tell you more: I may not go so far as to say it's the norm in Sweden, but it's definitely common to have an annual "utvecklingssamtal" (personal development discussion) and it's often combined with salary negotiations. Personally, I think these two discussions should be separate.

Good organisations use this opportunity to gather a lot more knowledge than what is related to performance. In particular, it can be a way to have an open-ended discussion about the work environment and what improvements can be ... (read more)

Having seen overworked operations staff in several organisations throughout my career, reducing stress and having a healthy culture seem to be key improvement factors regardless of organisation size. (This goes for many roles.) If you consistently can't accomplish everything you need to accomplish in 8 hrs/day – given a full-time situation – you are clearly understaffed and this should be resolved ASAP. There are many other stress reducers, such as many weeks of paid vacation per year, great salaries, clear areas of responsibility, structured interviews on... (read more)

How do you plan to encourage participants outside the EA community?

How come you do not mention open source projects? I don’t know how valuable it is nowadays, but working on e.g. Firefox early in my career definitely helped me learn fast from very good programmers in a real project used by millions. It has been a good CV item as well.