All of poliboni's Comments + Replies

Thank you very much for this great reply! I'll certainly check them out once I get back to thinking about population ethics.

I do want to make clear that the approach I took in this paper was one of seeing what views and implications would "flow" from reductionism, rather than one of finding the best theory to accommodate our existing moral intuitions in light of some new fact.

At Effective Altruism Wooster we've run similar events with great success. As described in this EA Forum post our talks were 1-3 min long. But we've also run it with longer talks.

We've also done a variation of this with the talks being about particular cause areas and only one, longer talk per event.

Thank you for this. The post by GiveWell is quite relevant. The post deals with the problem of whether an org such as Good Ventures should wait out to make their donations so that they can fill in gaps where needed and not donate to a charity past a point of decreasing returns. I think a platform for conditional donations may improve on Good Venture's solution of posting their decisions before giving season. Say there is an agreed-upon limit for how much funding a given charity can absorb. The platform could then coordinate donors so that this threshold is

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Thanks for the input. I would like to hear better names for this idea.

Yes, the idea is similar to crowdfunding. I think there is an important difference though. I see conditional donations working under some form of a website that directs donations to effective charities. Donors would thus be able to set many conditions for the optimal allocation of a specified lump sum. The main gain that I see is that this allows for more optimization than in a normal crowdfunding implementation, where you might have to split your budget.

"Donor coordination" is used, and Google turns up some results that seem relevant. There's been writing in EA on this topic; here's some on GiveWell's website. Relatedly, Open Philanthropy Project tries not to fund more than half of its grantees' budgets.

Answer by poliboniJul 24, 201912
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1. "Survey of arguments for focusing on suffering reduction"
-I'm particularly interested in arguments from and for the nonexistence of positive mental states.

2."The case for studying abroad at Oxford"
-Argue, based on personal experience, that students across the world who are interested in EA should seriously consider studying abroad at Oxford and provide advice on how to make the most of that experience.

3."The case for recruiting for AI safety research in Brazil"
-Lay out the reasons for thinking Brazil is a low hanging fruit for recruiting in AI safety research

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Aaron Gertler
5y
I'm especially curious about (2) if you include "spending time in the city of Oxford" and not just "getting into Oxford" (which, as noted below, is hard). I've been looking for posts about what it's like to be part of EA culture in the cities where it is most present (I now live in one of those, but I'm guessing that Oxford differs from Berkeley in many ways).
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SiebeRozendal
5y
Re:2. I hope you're not going to ignore that is really hard to get into Oxford? There's also the general tendency in EA to glorify Ivy League education, which makes a lot of people feel inadequate/excluded.
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Vaidehi Agarwalla
5y
I would be really interested in hearing the case for 3)!
  1. People in the EA movement would be a prime target for products created by these organizations, closing the feedback loop and territorializing an entire self-regulating market out of the movement. There is no ethical consumption under capitalism, perhaps, but perhaps there is under an EA-certification.

It seems to me that the combination of generating profits to support other EA orgs and having EAs as the target consumers would not be optimal. Because EAs already donate, by profiting off of them, profiting-to-give could, rather than moving more money in

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andavargas
5y
You make a very good point, and the economic analysis of this is comparable to finding the optimal tax rate. It’s certainly not an easy problem and fraught with politicization.