All of rafa_fanboy's Comments + Replies

ideally you shouldnt be risk-averse with your donations though

5
Brendon_Wong
5y
If the EA community invests all intended donations in a mix of investments that are high-EV and uncorrelated, many years there would be more money available to donate than if everyone had been more risk adverse. That sounds really beneficial. One potential issue is there aren’t that many highly liquid asset classes out there. If most EAs put their intended donations in stocks, there may be undesirable effects from having donations significantly decrease in recessions from negative returns on intended donations combined with a decrease in donations due to job loss/lowered income. On an individual level, another potential issue is that the variation in donation value could be more harmful than the higher EV. For example, at an extreme, doubling donations every 6 years and losing all the money every 4 years could lead to missed donation opportunities during those 4 years. The additional opportunities made possible with the doubled donations may not be impactful enough to overcome the effect of the missed donations. These concerns are just speculative. If nonprofits retain sufficient capital reserves to mitigate the effects of donation variability and if EAs adjust to funding shortfalls caused by other EAs not having enough cash on hand, then all EAs should be investing intended donations in high-EV options.

individual eas should be investing in high-risk high-reward for EV too right ?

4
Brendon_Wong
5y
That depends on the goals and risk tolerance of the individual. Generally, the longer the holding time, the higher the chance stocks and bonds outperform cash and cash equivalents. Therefore, investing with stocks and bonds is typically recommended for savings that aren’t needed in less than several years (like retirement savings).

1st = clean meat/GFI 2nd = diet change/THL

do 3rd world countries eat factory farmed meat?

3
kbog
5y
I'm not sure exactly, my perception is that (1) often they don't currently but the new growth is more likely to be factory farming, (2) traditional farming isn't clearly better. Farming in the West is probably covered by more welfare regulations than farming in poor countries.
1
Ramiro
5y
Sorry, I'm new here. You mean making a thread in this forum? I still don't know how.

frugal living course, or just look it up http://yboris.com/frugality/

question: how do u find ratio of chicken suffering to human ? is it square root # of neurons, so 20:1 ?

6
Julia_Wise
5y
This is not a question that anyone has an objective answer to.

is there a resource for e2g out there that doesnt focus on super hard jobs like ib/consulting? (other than this one) i think accounting is a pretty good career but idk if i could be donating more doing something else

3
kbog
5y
Go ahead and write one! Do some research/modeling and share your findings. I did, and you can too.
2
Denkenberger
5y
Accountants typically require a 4 year degree; vocational is generally 2 year degree or less.
3
SamDeere
5y
AFAIK random.org offers to run lotteries for you (for a fee), but all participants still need to trust them to generate the numbers fairly. It's obviously unlikely that there would in fact be any problem here, but we're erring on the side of having something that's easier for an external party to inspect.

what about the poor meat eater problem ? all donors should wait for clean meat to arrive before giving to poverty and maybe causing more harm to the animals there

3
mic
5y
I was going to link to EA Concepts: The Meat Eater Problem, as I thought it had been successfully argued that the meat eater problem was not much of a issue, but after re-reading those posts, it does seems that the meat eater problem is a reasonable concern so as long as farm animals have on expectation net negative lives.
-1
PetterHallqvist
5y
I see where you are coming from in terms of meat consumption but that is problematic ethically in my eyes - depriving people from a potential increase in QoL.

you dont need to specifically offset that, just donate to the best charity. you already have a net positive impact by being ea anyway

Rafa_fanboy, I've written to you but I'm not sure if you saw the message. You consistently make comments that aren't helpful, and people regularly report them. Please try to keep your comments in the realm of "friendly and productive."

i think carl shulman estimated chickens have 250k neurons, u could use that

9
Lukas Finnveden
5y
It's 221 million neurons. Source: http://reflectivedisequilibrium.blogspot.com/2013/09/how-is-brain-mass-distributed-among.html You might be thinking about fruit flies, they have 250k

whats the charity overhead for something like miri or fhi?

1
Tetraspace
5y
In MIRI's fundraiser they released their 2019 budget estimate, which spends about half on research personnel. I'm not sure how this compares to similar organizations.

ok, im not sure if ai researchers get paid that much though

3
Tetraspace
5y
The cost per researcher is typically larger than what they get paid, since it also includes overhead (administration costs, office space, etc).
9
Tee
5y
I would imagine this should play into it: "£13.3m boost for Future of Humanity Institute" https://www.fhi.ox.ac.uk/grant-announcement/

That's what happens when everyone who runs EA graduated from either an Ivy League school or Oxford

Dont forget the $13.3M grant the FHI got a few weeks ago, I felt like that was huge for EA

2
Evan_Gaensbauer
5y
I didn't know about that. That's incredible!