All of Siao Si's Comments + Replies

I sometimes downvote comments and posts mostly because I think they have "too much" karma - comments and posts I might upvote or not vote on if they had less karma. As I look at the comment now it has 2 karma with 11 votes - maybe at some point it had more and people voted it back to 2?

I would have downvoted this comment if it had more karma because I think Deborah's comment can be read as antagonistic: "utterly blind", "dire state", "for heaven's sake!", calling people ignorant. In this context I didn't read it this way, but I often vote based on "what would the forum be like if all comments were more like this" rather than "what intentions do I think this person has".

Hi Deborah, I also disagree with this comment (and have disagree voted but not downvoted it). Here are some of my reasons:

• Without getting too much into it, I think the concerns with the population growth/technological change trend are somewhat distinct from problems relating to the current population size of the earth. One can be concerned that the population replacement rate is dropping too fast while also thinking that the current global population is too large.
• I think that, while the summarised breakdown you have under the overpopulation project link yo

I think having a separate section for community posts has greatly improved my experience of the forum. However I think there are still quite a lot of posts that stay on the front page for a long time for similar reasons to why community posts did - because they '[interest] everyone at least a little bit' and/or are 'accessible to everyone, or on topics where everyone has an opinion'. 

I want to see posts that do things like present the results of significant work get more attention, and to a lesser extent posts that are topical - i.e. announcements abo... (read more)

I imagine there could be a useful office in a city with ~20 people using it regularly and ~100 people interested enough in EA to come to some events, and I wouldn't think of that city as an "EA hub".

I also think eg. a London office has much more value than an eg. an Oxford or Cambridge office (although I understand all three to be hubs), even though Oxford and Cambridge have a higher EA-density.

located in an existing hub so that program participants have plenty of people outside the program to interact with

I don't understand this consideration. It seems to me that people located in a place with a more robust existing community are the people that would counterfactually benefit the least from a place to interact with other EAs, because they have plenty of opportunities to do so already.

I'm assuming by "hub" you mean "EA hub", but if by "hub" you mean "a place with high population density/otherwise a lot of people to talk to", then this makes sense... (read more)

Can you say more precisely what it means for a fund to be recommended? For instance, how should a donor compare giving to one of the "recommended funds" to giving to a specific charity or project directly? (and by extension one of GWWC's new funds over a specific charity)

How did you choose the set of evaluators to evaluate -- for instance, why evaluate LTFF and LLF over FP's GCR fund? Were there other evaluators considered for the process but not evaluated?

It's kind of jarring to read that someone has been banned for "violating a norm" - that word to me implies that they're informal agreements between the community. Why not call them "rules"?

tabforacause - a browser extension which shows you ads and directs ad revenue to charity - has launched a way to set GiveDirectly as the charity you want to direct ad revenue to. 

It doesn't raise a lot of money per tab opened, obviously, but I'm not using my newtab page for anything else and find the advertising unobtrusive - its in the corner, not taking up the whole screen - if. you're like me in these respects it could be something to add.

Fixed now, thanks for flagging!

How many evaluators typically rate each grant application?

Is there a place to donate to the operations / running of LTFF or the funds in general?

I'd think the article you're referencing (link) basically argues against considering "daode" to mean "morality" and vice-versa. 

The abstract: "In contemporary Western moral philosophy literature that discusses the Chinese ethical tradition, it is a commonplace practice to use the Chinese term daode 道德 as a technical translation of the English term moral. The present study provides some empirical evidence showing a discrepancy between the terms moral and daode."

Hm, I think Hamish's estimate of the cost included a bunch of tinkering with the settings; I can see it going either way. Another thing I think is more important is flexibility to make code changes and iteratively improve - how do you feel notion would do with that? I'm curious to see what you managed to get on Notion if you're willing to talk through it with us.

(BTW, are you the Patrick Liu who participated in the Stampy hackathon this past weekend?)

Thanks for pointing this out! I've fixed it in this post and we'll look into checking it automatically

Yes, there's one this weekend. Thanks for flagging the link, I've fixed it now.

Oh I see, thanks! - I didn't realise this because the statement that appears after indicating you've been personally referred is: "Since you were referred to this position, the rest of the application is optional" which makes it sound like it wouldn't be optional if you weren't referred.

I just looked at the application for the role of content specialist for CEA, which seems to involve a lot of working on this forum. 

I noticed that if one indicates they have been personally referred by someone 'involved in effective altruism', one is given the option to skip 'the rest of the application' - which seems like the majority of the substantive information one is asked to give. 

This seems overtly nepotistic, and I can't think of a good reason for it - can anyone give one?

Should be fixed now, thanks for highlighting. 
There's EA VR - they're listed as inactive but I think there's some activity in their discord. Look forward to seeing you around and feel free to ping anyone with 'EAGather Steward' in their name for a tour :)

I'm not sure about this particular  case, but I don't think the value of the property increasing over time is a generally good argument for why investments need not be publicly discussed. A lot of potential altruistic spending has benefits that accrue over time, where the benefits of money spent earlier outweighs the benefits of money spent later - as has been discussed extensively when comparing giving now vs. giving later.

The whole premise of EA is that resources should be spent in effective ways, and potential altruistic benefits is no excuse for an ineffective spending of money.

It seems like setting ourselves up for selection bias if we take listen only to people with experience with "how bad journalism gets". We also  want to get advice from people with good experiences with journalism, because they might be doing things that make them more likely to get good experiences, and presumably know about how to continue to go about having good experiences, having gotten them.

There may be some parts of EA where the media don't start out nicely inclined to the area at hand, but I think on many topics we might care to engage with the... (read more)

I think it would be better if agree/disagree voting didn't follow the typical karma rules where different users have different amounts of karma. As it stands I often don't know how many people expressed agreement vs. disagreement, which feels like the information I actually want, and it doesn't make intuitive sense that one forum user might be able to "agree twice as much" as another with a comment.

Perhaps you've seen these things already if you're thinking about having kids, but Julia Wise and Jeff Kaufman have written about their decision to be parents and their experiences parenting extensively. The stuff I could find that addresses the question of making the decision:

• OK to Have Kids?
• Cheerfully
• What startup founders should think about before having kids

Thanks for writing this post! I think promoting diversity in EA is incredibly important and I appreciate your contribution to it.

However, I get a feeling here that you've started with an underlying assumption that "EA should cater to women", which I don't see the argument for. Certainly, if there's a stark lack of women throughout EA, I'd feel that there's a problem that needs to be specifically addressed - but I don't think this is the case. 

You present information about the academic fields that correlate with participation in EA, and note that there... (read more)

Thanks for this! It wouldn't have occurred to me to consider the decline of footbinding as a case study of moral progress, 

I think you've probably noted this and perhaps didn't mention it because it's not directly relevant to the main questions you're investigating, but I think it's important to note for someone who only reads this post that having bound feet was a status symbol - it began among the social elite and spread over time to lower social classes, remained a status symbol because families who needed girls to conduct agricultural labor could not partake in the practice, and in practice an incentive to do it was to increase marriage prospects.

A suggestion that might preserve the value of giving higher karma users more voting power, while addressing some of the concerns: give users with karma the option to +1 a post instead of +2/+3, if they wish.

related: Can we agree on a better name than 'near-termist'?

Thanks for writing this up! 

I'm not sure about the implications, but I just want to register that deciding to roll repeatedly, after each roll for a total of n rolls, is not the same as committing to n rolls at the beginning. The latter is equivalent in expected value to rolling every trial at the same time: the former has a much higher expected value. It is still positive, though.

I wanted to describe my personal experience in case it shifts anyone like me towards applying. I was accepted, received travel support, and went to EAG London last month. 

Initially, I considered the likelihood that I would be accepted and be able to go very low: I didn't think I was involved enough in EA and I didn't think it made sense for me to receive travel support to go as I live very far from London. I also didn't think that I 'deserved' to go: I reasoned that I shouldn't take a spot from someone more engaged in EA or could provide more value to... (read more)

Thanks for writing this up!

What are the use cases you envision for terms like these ones?

I appreciate the concern that people might feel deceived when finding out that the movement doesn't look quite like what they were expecting, but I think this might be better addressed by pointing out to new people EA is a broad group with a variety of interests, values, and attitudes.

I'm concerned that splitting up EA according to aesthetics/subcultures might be harmful, and I think it should be handled with care. The human tendency to look for identity labels and sub... (read more)

(disclaimer that I talked to Sasha before he put up this post) but as a 'random EA person' I did find reading this clarifying.

It's not that I  believed that "orthogonality thesis the reason why AGI safety is an important cause area", but that I had never thought about the distinction between "no known law relating intelligence and motivations" and "near-0 statistical correlation between intelligence and motivations".  

If I'd otherwise been prompted to think about it, I'd probably have arrived at the former, but I think the latter was rattling around inside my system 1 because the term "orthogonality" brings to mind orthogonal vectors.

I've sometimes thought about if 'immortality' is the right framing, at least for the current moment. Like AllAmericanBreakfast points out, I think that anti-ageing research is unlikely to produce life extensions in the 100x to 1000x range all at once.

In any case, even if we manage to halt ageing entirely, ceteris paribus there will still be deaths from accidents and other causes. A while ago I tried a fermi calculation on this, I think I used this data (United States, 2017). The death rate for people between 15-34 is ~0.1%/year, this rate of death would pu... (read more)

Thank you!

Thanks for your list and please do!

I don't think ignoring animal feed makes sense here, I can't find the source at the moment but the vast majority of Peruvian anchoveta is reduced to fish meal and exported to countries like China to serve as feed for land animals and even species of larger fish, the incentive structure is such that factories that are supposed to produce anchoveta derivatives for direct human consumption illegally produce fish meal.

I think increased consumption of fish sauce over other animals would be moving down the food chain and result in a net decrease in animal suffering, not to mention advantageous for fishing-reliant economies there.