All of Rasool's Comments + Replies

I can see a bunch of EA orgs (and others) have used these folks:

https://www.ppf.org/

In the UK at least, they are especially desperate for donors who are male and/or from an ethnic minority background

https://www.anthonynolan.org/help-save-a-life/join-stem-cell-register

Some others here: https://tomweinresearch.me/job-boards/

I encourage people to check out the EA art and fiction tag, in particular these posts:

• https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/WNKhrcddQyyZceGNW/some-longtermist-fiction
• https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zCJDF6iNSJHnJ6Aq6/a-ranked-list-of-all-ea-relevant-audio-books-i-ve-read
• https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ebgd79z64LESeLxGN/what-are-your-favorite-examples-of-moral-heroism-altruism-in
  
   

Seconding Strong Female Protagonist, and noting that it is also available as a printed graphic novel for those who prefer to read offline

Oh for sure, and I gladly donated.

I just didn't want this to turn into a whole conversation about effectiveness, but rather the power of stories

Someone accidentally donated $15,000 instead of $150 to their neighbour's charity in Bangladesh. Before they could get a refund they were inundated with pictures and videos from the grateful recipients.

In addition to then donating $1,500 rather than the $150 as originally planned, they also told the story of their blunder on reddit, which went viral and caused ~3000 people to donate ~$100,000

Warm fuzzies galore

See also: https://www.emilydamstra.com/please-enough-dead-butterflies/

Looking forward to this!

While I do like spacing things out, 1 month between posts seems like a long time to me

Thanks for sharing! This is exactly the kind of thing I'd love to see more of on the forum

You mentioned starting ADHD meds? I'd be very interested in reading about the process leading up to that, if you feel like sharing

Do you have a view on using LLMs as therapists as suggested here?

The "poorly identified fiat" did tickle me

Thanks for the summary!

You mention that ~9% of Trial Pledgers have gone on to take the GWWC Pledge, do you know what the other 91% did (eg. extend their trial, stop entirely, commit to a smaller pledge like OFTW)?

Amazing work! And great write-up

This is potentially very exciting idea! Some thoughts:

• How does this compare to running a fundraiser for an effective charity (for example via GWWC like this one)
  • Or possibly running 3 fundraisers simultaneously to get people thinking about comparing charities
• You are kind of imposing a burden on people, like if I were to receive this coupon, I'd have a deadline to go and do some stuff, which I might not end up doing, and then feel guilty about
• I wonder about the privacy angle, I guess people's choices here are known to the organiser?
• The viral effect is interesting but how will it be measured?

I'd be interested in seeing your comments David!

Further resources and discussion at this post How and why to turn everything into audio 

That link to the The Harvard Grant longitudinal study is dead, and isn't on archive.org, but this is the study's homepage, an Atlantic piece ($), and a TED talk, by the director of the study

It was a pleasure! I especially liked the supplementary spreadsheets though I didn't get round to including them in my list

Since this post argues for expanding our moral circle and advocates for non-human welfare, I choose The Humane League.

Thanks for your donation!

I'm super excited by this! The figures around stickiness and new money are very promising

P.S. Love the handwritten notes!

Not to be confused with https://tythe.org/ which is another EA-ish effective giving charity :)

There are two kinds of taxes - income tax and national insurance - and donating to charity only reduces your income tax^[1]. 

I talk a bit about donating through your payroll vs via Gift Aid with some examples in my post here.

To add to Raoul's point, the government provides a benefit whether you donate via your payroll, or through your post-tax earnings, but donating via payroll:

• Is easier for you, especially if you are a high earner, since you don't have to apply for your tax rebate
• Is easier for the charity, they don't have to worry about Gift Aid

1. ^{^}

   If yo

People might like the slides from the Stanford University CS 007: Personal Finance for Engineers

It's criminal that this post doesn't have more attention, and I assumed there'd be a heated competition but here's my 19:

1. Playful alteration of a famous quote by Jeremy Bentham.
2. "disfingerment"
3. Comparing the number of portraits to the number of cat videos on the internet
4. Comparison of solving a Rubik's Cube blindfolded
5. The inclusion of data "paralysis" and "divination"
6. The mention of Hogwarts
7. Holding séances with deceased experts.
8. The suggestion of using a brain computer interface to consult with ChatGPT
9. The idea of being prepared to deny everything
10. The mention of t

ㅤ

This Colab notebook, is user-friendly and free, and combines Whisper with some other models to do transcription and diarisation.

You mentioned, that you were struggling to get something similar working with recordings of 20 minutes, which I haven't tried, but I can confirm it works great for recordings of 45m+

You didn't mention Portraits of Animals Welfare Society (PAWS) who are also desperate for funding. They believe that our circle of compassion should extend beyond just portraits of humans to include non-human animals as well

Cool thanks, I did not know about that first one.

I note that that is different to how it works on substack comments, where clicking to the left of a comment collapses the parent comment rather than scrolling to it like here

One feature I really like on forums like Hacker News is the ability to traverse comments by having options to jump to a comment's parent, or next or previous sibling.

When you are deep in a gnarly comment thread, I find it useful to be able to hop up a couple of levels and then minimise a comment and its children

This is what comments looks like on Hacker News for example:

On https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/allPosts, clicking on a shortform expands it, but there is no way to unexpand/contract it

This is not the case with topic page edit and discussion, where clicking on the topic title toggles between expanding it and unexpanding it

Ideally shortforms could be toggled unexpanded in a similar way

Oop yes you are correct, I wrote that in haste, let me make an edit

You can set your browser to not let websites choose their own fonts, and to use your settings instead^[1].

Not only do you get your own font preferences but it is quicker (no more requests off to Google Fonts or other places to download custom fonts) and more private (no more sending personal info to Google Fonts who get which has caused publishers to be fined from time to time for not being GDPR-compliant)

1. ^{^}

   In Firefox, go to about:config in a new tab, then set browser.display.use_document_fonts to 0. 

Have you looked at EA Anywhere? You might be able to set up something up through that

I just came across an interesting (and not too long) article on this point. Quoting the juicy parts:

In 1996, Dr. Jochem Hoyer, a well-known German surgeon and head of a transplantation unit at a university hospital was told by a colleague, “It is easy for you as a transplant surgeon to praise living donors as long as it is NOT you who has to donate, but someone else.”³ Hoyer then voluntarily donated a kidney to an unknown recipient on the Munich waiting list⁴ with the idea that this would make a “very strong statement.”⁵

His action led to proposals in Germa

Great interview! I particularly liked the parts about self-signalling and moral offsetting

I look forward to reading others in this series!

Couple of things:

• I get the impression you recorded your conversation and then typed it up, is that recording in a shareable format? People like to listen to posts, this might be (or already has been) converted to audio via nonlinear but it might be nice to hear the original
• Minor thing but I'd prefer the current speaker to be in bold type (ie. Amber: Tell me about what you’re doing. Tyler: I work for The Humane League.) to make it easier to distinguish a change in speaker

Same general principles apply in the UK - a simple guide is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZwTrykpvztrF5FQQL/how-to-set-up-a-uk-organisation-limited-company-version

The link from linkposts like this one, don't work, I assume because the link needs to be prefixed with https://

Can this be added automatically if it is missing, or do linkposts need to go via https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/out?url=

Ah gotcha, re: the pay cut thing then yes 100%, not least because employers also pay national insurance of 13.8%!

So your employer is paying 13.8%, then you are paying 40% income tax, and 2% employee national insurance.

And gift aid / payroll giving is pretty good, but not that good!

Interesting initiative!

Some scattered thoughts:

• You might like Anton Howes' blog, where he discusses invention and progress ~1500-1800. There could be some interesting lessons as people are considering ways of incentivising progress like prizes and impact certificates
• I often think about why electricity didn't immediately revolutionise manufacturing (spoiler: people had to shift their mindset away from thinking of one giant steam engine powering every machine, to having small electric motors at each machine that could be controlled individually)
• There are som

• Some interesting discussion at taking a pay cut when working in something directly here.
• I think you are mistaken on how Gift Aid / payroll giving works in the UK (your footnote 4), it only has an effect once you are a higher rate or additional rate taxpayer. I wrote some examples up here. As a basic rate taxpayer you don't get any benefit - only the charity does.
• My impression is that people within EA already defer too much in their donation choices and so should be spending more time thinking about how and where to give, what is being missed by Givewell/OP

See also:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bZPzDgF9nEXNnGgct/the-allegedly-best-business-books-1

For FOI requests in the UK, take a look at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/

It makes submitting and tracking requests simple - and also public, so everyone can see the outcome

(Semi-serious), since we care about the long-term future, denote years with a 10,000 year digit, so 02023 instead of 2023, like they do at longnow.org

Thanks for sharing!

You can subscribe to other users' new posts from their profile, but I would like to be able to subscribe to users' new comments which I don't see a way to do

Another totally free alternative is OBS studio, though it's possibly more featureful and less user-friendly than Loom

Ctrl+K is a pretty well-known shortcut, for example on Google Docs, and works here too

Loved this! And congratulations on your first forum post!

One thing I like to think about with experiments is that they can help motivate you to try new things that seem daunting. Rather than something like: "2023 is going to be my year of going to the gym / going out more / learning French", you can rephrase it as, "I am going to experiment with going to the gym solidly for the next 4 weeks and then re-evaluate".

Not only does it make things more concrete and achievable, but there is also no way to "fail" - since all you are doing is testing a hypothesis