All of ricoh_aficio's Comments + Replies

Does anyone know if clawbacks and/or the voluntary return process apply to funds received from individuals formerly at FTX?

Thank you for posting this, Gavin. For the title, Facebook says he was born June 15, 1979.

I’m stunned and heavy with the loss of such a wonderful man.

Use this tool to find the vegan protein bar that's best for you:
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Many props for doing this. This is exactly the sort of careful critique I'd like to see more people generating.

Did you approach 80,000 Hours about your post before putting it up? If you didn't, it seems quite plausible that they'd have integrated some of these changes after speaking with you directly. The benefits of approaching them first are that it appears less adversarial and (less certain) they are more likely to notice. However, I think there are also arguments for publishing publicly and independently, too.

Milan and I spoke about this, so I'm just commenting to let other readers know that I'm happy to be a resource on this, specifically if you're looking at US programs. For context, I'm a Master's student in Georgetown's Security Studies Program, in their Technology and Security concentration, but have considered and think well of other programs, too.

New piece by John Halstead: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1qs/new_research_on_effective_climate_charities/

Have you seen this?: https://conceptually.org/about/

For people looking to get into CBT, Spencer Greenberg and co. are developing an app to walk people through it: https://www.uplift.us/

We can do the same for trading talent. People thinking about working in another cause area can ask around whether there’s someone considering switching to a cause area preferred by them. However, trading places in this scenario brings major practical challenges, so it is likely not viable in most cases.

One difficulty with this is that it's hard to go back on the trade if the other person decides to stop cooperating. If you're doing a moral trade of say, being vegetarian in order to get someone to donate more to a poverty charity, you can just stop being... (read more)

Cost-of-living comparison between San Francisco, CA and Oxford, UK: https://www.numbeo.com/cost-of-living/compare_cities.jsp?country1=United+Kingdom&country2=United+States&city1=Oxford&city2=San+Francisco%2C+CA&tracking=getDispatchComparison

Right, neither do I. My 25-hour estimate was how long it would take you to make one grant of ~£500,000, not a bunch of grants adding up to that amount. I assumed that if Open Phil had been distributing these funds it would have done so by giving greater amounts to far fewer recipients.

For what it's worth, Owen thinks I should use at least double $75/hour, given the experience of the staff working on the project and the nature of the work.

Something we can do to clarify?

Hm, we haven't considered this in particular, although we are considering alternative funding models. If you think we should prioritize setting something like this up, can you make the case for this over our current scheme or more general certificates of impact?

are all the grants made to individuals only, or are some of them made to corporations (such as nonprofits)?

Some of them are going to nonprofits and other institutions, yes.

is there a way to see in which cases the grant is going to a corporation, and what the corporation is?

This wasn't something we'd considered publishing, and I'm not sure what if any privacy concerns this could raise. If there's a good case for doing so I'm happy to consider adding that information.

Do the receiving individuals have to treat the grants as personal income?

Unfortun... (read more)

Sloppy editing; thanks for the catch. It should actually be fixed now.

Yes, although what exactly that will entail is still being worked out.

There's the weak form of evaluation -- whether or not they completed the objectives they set out when applying -- which we're doing for both "is this an obviously bad project?" and legal compliance reasons. We're also hoping to do Fermi estimates on the value produced as a result of projects, both changes in value in the world and of the recipient.

Since I'm not going to be in charge of this, though, this is more my recommendation for what to do than a plan.

My guess would be that the main cost of EA grants was CEA staff time, not the £500,000. Would you agree? And what do you think the ratio is, very roughly?

It depends on the value you place on CEA staff time. Internally we value the average CEA staff hour at ~$75 ($50-$150, depending on the nature of the work), so 840 * £56 = £47,040 in opportunity cost, plus real staff costs. This suggests that staff time wasn't the main cost, unless you think the counterfactual uses of time would have been far more impactful than our average.

This is a description of t

Oops, yes they were. Fixed. Thanks!

The next upcoming deadline is August 30th, with new application deadlines every quarter. You can find more details about this here: https://www.eaglobal.org/eagx-when/

In brief, large speaker events and workshops, depending on the needs of a local group. Perhaps self-evidently, large speaker events are best for nascent chapters trying to attract interest; workshops for augmenting the engagement and/or skill of existing members. There's some information about this in the Organizer FAQ, as well a prompts about this in the EAGx organizer application and on the "Get Involved' tab of effectivealtruism.org.

Wonderful of you to offer! Follow-up hasn't been weak across-the-board but it's certainly a hard thing for organizers to juggle on top of everything else.

We have limited resources set up for this at the moment, such as: a) the ability to reach out to Harri for local group advice and funding, b) copies of Doing Good Better you can use for a book club, c) the chance to request EA Global tickets to raffle off, d) a series of follow-up emails to attendees, and e) brief advice for running a follow-up event (https://goo.gl/w9fkYS).

Happy to take suggestions for other things we might do.

I'm curious what prompted this change - did organizers encounter a lot of difficult converting new conference attendees to more engaged EAs?

They were often stretched so thin from making the main event happen that they didn't have the capacity to ensure that their follow-up events were solid. We think part of the problem will be mitigated if the events themselves are smaller and more targeted towards groups with a specific level of EA understanding.

I'm also curious about what sort of support CEA will be providing to smaller, less-established local grou

Ah, the wording makes this unclear. It isn't that we're dictating that more events take on the more onerous format, but instead restricting the name "EAGx" to the few events who already believe it is best for their region to run a full-weekend event. In fact, we're encouraging most groups /not/ to do this, and instead run smaller, more targeted events.

The real shifts are a) discouraging groups from running events that are more intensive than suit their circumstances and b) using a different name for the less-intensive events to avoid the confusio... (read more)

Thanks for the question.

In brief, we're of the view that a) EA is more talent-constrained rather than funding-constrained (https://80000hours.org/2015/11/why-you-should-focus-more-on-talent-gaps-not-funding-gaps/), and b) the people we'd like to have do direct work in many cases already exist in the EA sphere but don't have the affordance or nudge to dedicate themselves to EA work full-time.

We, in collaboration with 80,000 Hours, have been tracking the rate and value of engagement of people we try to engage with EA. We have figured out ways to easily and s... (read more)

Appreciate you posting! I actually drew inspiration from that for the Involvement Guide, but if you think I missed something I'd be more than happy to hear it.

Thanks for the comment. It wasn't very necessary there, so even though it seems fairly innocuous to me given its frequency of use I decided to nix it.

That's right. We're also asking that organizers plan a follow-up event(s) to capture the interest generated by the event, but otherwise intend for the commitment to end post-conference.

Hi UriKatz, there's a group of us trying to do just that, and we'd love to have your help. Join the EA Nerdfighters Facebook group and I'll brief you on what we've been up to. :)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/254657514743021/