Thanks for pointing this out, the version on the GPI website has been corrected.

Thanks, this is really helpful information about trusts and the 4% rule! 

On self trust: I feel that a common pattern might be that when you're young, you're 'idealistic' and want to do things like donate. When you're older, you feel like spending your money (if you have it) in ways that might not make you particularly happy. I might even decide I would rather give it all to my kids (if I have some). This makes me think there's a good chance I won't donate it later if I haven't pre-committed. 

On safety: I am from Australia, and to some extent my context is probably quite different to many others. (On the whole, Australia tends to look after you if you get severely injured or run entirely out of money. This makes quick access less of a pressing consideration for me). But to the extent that it is an important consideration, why not have a little money that's easily accessible and most of it in a trust?

Here are some articles I think would make good scripts (I'll also be submitting one script of my own). 

Summaries of the following papers:

• The Epistemic Challenge to Longtermism 
• A Paradox for Tiny Probabilities and Enormous Values 
• The Case for Strong Longtermism
• Forecasting transformative AI: the "biological anchors" method in a nutshell
• Are we living at the hinge of History?^[1]
• In defence of fanaticism^[1]
• Longtermist Institutional Reform^[1]
• Doomsday Rings Twice^[1]
• Asymmetry, Uncertainty, and the Longterm^[1]
• Simulation in Expectation^[1]
• Moral Uncertainty about population axiology^[1]
• Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils^[1]

I'd also suggest the following papers which I haven't seen a summary of:

• The Potato's Contribution to Population and Urbanization: Evidence from a Historical Experiment
• A Bayesian Truth Serum for Subjective Data
• Improving Judgments of Existential Risk: Better Forecasts, Questions, Explanations, Policies
• The Parliamentary Approach to Moral Uncertainty
• Is Power-Seeking AI an Existential Risk?
• I'd also suggest all of WWOTF's supplementary materials, especially Significance, Persistence and Contingency.

(Edit: Spacing)

1. ^{^}

    I am writing these 8 summaries, message me if you want to see them early.  

Recently, I was reading David Thorstad’s new paper “Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils”. In it, he models the value of reducing existential risk on a range of different assumptions.

The headline result is that 1) most plausibly, existential risk reduction is not overwhelmingly valuable–though it may still be quite valuable, it doesn’t probably swamp all other cause areas. And 2) thinking that extinction is more likely tends to weaken the case for existential risk reduction rather than strengthen it.

It struck me that one of the results is particularly interesting, I call it the repugnant solution:

If we can reduce existential risk to 0% per century across all future centuries, this act is infinitely valuable, even if the initial risk was absolutely tiny and each century is only just of positive value. This act is therefore, better than basically anything else we could do.

Perhaps, in a Pascalian way, if we think there is a tiny chance that some particular action will lead to a permanent reduction in existential risk, that act too is infinitely valuable, and everything breaks.

This is also true even if we decrease the value of each century from “really amazingly great” to “only just net positive”.

This is great! 

Thanks for the post - this seems like a really important contribution! 

[Caveat: I am not at all an expert on this and just spent some time googling]. Snake antivenom actually requires that you milk venom from a snake to produce, and I wonder how much this is contributing to the high cost ($55–$640)  of snake venom [1]. I wonder if R&D would be a better investment, especially given the potentially high storage and transport costs for snake venom (see below). It would be interesting to see someone investigate this more thoroughly.

Storage costs are pretty low in that cost effectiveness estimate you cite [2], but it seems pretty plausible to me that storage and transportation costs would be much higher if you wanted to administer snake venom at smaller clinics that were closer to the victims of snake bites. The cost was based on this previous estimate,  in which they say“The cost of shipping from abroad where the antivenoms are manufactured, transportation within Nigeria and freezing of antivenom (including use of supplementary diesel power electric generators in addition to national power grid) is estimated at N3,000 ($18.75) from prior experience and expert opinion. But it was assumed that appropriate storage facilities already exist at the local level through immunization/drug services and that no additional capital investment would be required to adequately store the antivenom in the field” [3].
I'm not sure exactly what facilities are required and how expensive they would be, but this seems like it could be an important consideration.
 

[1] Brown NI (2012) Consequences of neglect: analysis of the sub-Saharan African snake antivenom market and the global context. PLoS Negl Trop Dis. 6: e1670.

[2] Hamza M, Idris MA, Maiyaki MB, Lamorde M, Chippaux JP, et al. (2016) Cost-Effectiveness of Antivenoms for Snakebite Envenoming in 16 Countries in West Africa. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 10(3): e0004568. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0004568

[3] Habib AG, Lamorde M, Dalhat MM, Habib ZG, Kuznik A (2015) Cost-effectiveness of Antivenoms for Snakebite Envenoming in Nigeria. PLOS Neglected Tropical Diseases 9(1): e3381. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pntd.0003381

Thanks, it looks like you've put a lot of effort into summarising this information (it actually looks better and higher effort than my original post, oop). 

Thank you! I really appreciate the encouragement!