Nowadays I would not be so quick to say that existential risk probability is mostly sitting on "never" 😔. This does open up an additional way to make a clock, literally just tick down to the median (which would be somewhere in the acute risk period). 

I was looking for the address of the venue to plan travel, but couldn't find it on this events page, so I'll make a comment. It's on effectivealtruism.org here, namely:

Tobacco Dock, Tobacco Quay, Wapping Lane, London, E1W 2SF, London, United Kingdom.

Also, lending is somewhat of a commitment mechanism: if someone gets or buys a book, they have forever which can easily mean it takes forever, but if they borrow it there's time pressure to give it back which means either read it soon or lose it.

As of this comment: 40%, 38%, 37%, 5%. I haven't taken into account time passing since the button appeared.

With 395 total codebearer-days, a launch has occurred once. This means that, with 200 codebearers this year, the Laplace prior for any launch happening is 40%  ($1-(1-\frac{1}{396}{)}^{200}$). The number of participants is about in between 2019 (125 codebearers) and 2020 (270 codebearers), so doing an average like this is probably fine.

I think there's a 5% chance that there's a launch but no MAD, because Peter Wildeford has publicly committed to MAD, says 5%, and he knows himself best.

I think the EA forum is a little bit, but not vastly, more likely to initiate a launch, because the EA Forum hasn't done Petrov day before and qualitatively people seem to be having a bit more fun and irreverance over here, so I'm giving 3% of the no-MAD probability to EA Forum staying up and 2% to Lesswrong staying up.

I looked up GiveDirectly's financials (a charity that does direct cash transfers) to check how easily it could be scaled up to megaproject-size and it turns out, in 2020, it made $211 million in cash transfers and hence is definitely capable of handling that amount! This is mostly $64m in cash transfers to recipients in Sub-Saharan Africa (their Givewell-recommended program) and $146m in cash transfers to recipients in the US.

Another principle, conservation of total expected credit:

Say a donor lottery has you, who donates a fraction $p$  of the total with an impact judged by you if you win of $X$, the other participants, who collectively donate a fraction $q$ of the total with an average impact as judged by you if they win of $Y$, and the benefactor, who donates a fraction $1-p-q$ of the total with an average impact if they win of $0$. Then total expected credit assigned by you should be $pX+qY$ (followed by A, B and C), and total credit assigned by you should be $X$ if you win, $Y$ if they win, and $0$ otherwise (violated by C).

• Under A, if you win, your credit is $pX$, their credit is $qX$,  and the benefactor's credit is $(1-p-q)X$, for a total credit of $X$. If they win, your credit is $pY$, their credit is $qY$, and the benefactor's credit is $(1-p-q)Y$, for a total credit of $Y$.
  • Your expected credit is $p(pX+qY)$, their expected credit is $q(pX+qY)$, and the benefactor's expected credit is $(1-p-q)(pX+qY)$, for a total expected credit of $pX+qY$.
• Under B, if you win, your credit is $X$ and everyone else's credit is $0$, for a total credit of $X$. If they win, their credit is $Y$ and everyone else's credit is $0$, for a total credit of $Y$. If the benefactor wins, everyone gets no credit.
  • Your expected credit is $pX$ and their expected credit is $pY$, for a total expected credit of $pX+qY$.
• Under C, under all circumstances your credit is $pX$ and their credit is $qY$, for a total credit of $pX+qY$.
  • Your expected credit is $pX$ and their expected credit is $qY$, for a total expected credit of $pX+qY$.

I've been thinking of how to assign credit for a donor lottery.

Some ways that seem compelling:

• A: You get X% credit for the actual impact of the winner
• B: You get 100% credit for the impact if you win, and 0% credit otherwise
• C: You get X% credit for what your impact would have been, if you won

Some principles about assigning credit:

• Credit is predictable and proportional to the amount you pay to fund an outcome (violated by B)
• Credit depends on what actually happens in real life (violated by C)
• Your credit depends on what you do, not what uncorrelated other people do (violated by A)

Some actual uses of assigning credit and what they might say:

• When I'm tracking my own impact, I use something kind of like C - there's a line on my spreadsheet that looks like "Donor lottery - £X", which I smile at a little more than the Long Term Future Fund, because C is how I estimate my expected impact ahead of time.
• Impact certificates can't be distributed according to C because they correspond to actual impacts in the world, and are minted by the organizations that receive the grants and sold in exchange for the grants. You could kind of recover C by selling the rights to any impact certificates you would receive before the lottery is drawn.
• A means that your credit is correlated with the decisions of other participants, which the CEA Donor Lottery is designed to avoid and which makes the decision whether to participate harder.

What were your impressions for the amount of non-Open Philanthropy funding allocated across each longtermist cause area?

I also completed Software Foundations Volume 1 last year, and have been kind of meaning to do the rest of the volumes but other things keep coming up. I'm working full-time so it might be beyond my time/energy constraints to keep a reasonable pace, but would you be interested in any kind of accountability buddy / sharing notes / etc. kind of thing?