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All of TheUtilityMonster's Comments + Replies

What are the EA movement's most notable accomplishments?
TheUtilityMonster3y4
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If I define impact as change and outcome as a result, then isn't every occurrence of an impact an outcome? Are you defining those words differently? 

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Linch
3y
$X donated to Y is an outcome, but not a real impact in a moral sense until Y does things that benefit moral patients in some way or another. (I agree that Jonas could've been clearer).
Charity teaching people to learn & form knowledge effectively
TheUtilityMonster3y7
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I'm open to the idea and I probably haven't thought about it as much as you, but I'm skeptical about the way you discuss going about it in your post and also that the work of the experts that seem to have inspired you is impactful.  

I suspect the techniques you've discussed will greatly improve your memory, but I'd guess that it's often not worth the time to memorize something. Based on my experience working as a software engineer, my attitude has been you can't learn everything . At least in software engineering, you need to adapt to new languages an... (read more)

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alexanderklarge
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Cheers for the reply! Some thoughts from your comment: Target audience/ sectors where this would be most useful I definitely agree that in general what I have in mind is academia/research-type fields as the sectors where this system would be especially useful, particularly in committing to memory new ideas from fields, research papers etc. Whilst I've had some success using flashcards to learn Python and some other comp sci-adjacent things, it's definitely the case that in programming your learn primarily by doing. I think the flashcards still help a great deal in i.e. ensuring I remember the essentials of a particular Python library despite not having used it for a long time, but I'd definitely agree overall that it's less useful in programming. I've also ran into the bad habit of making coding flashcards on things I a) haven't fully understood or b) haven't really needed, which has wasted time - these are some of the things to avoid that I'd definitely make sure to cover.   Unstructured learning Unstructured learning is a new concept to me so I'm excited to check it out! This sounds like it could be something I've totally missed from my workflow that could introduce some really big gains. Intellectual superstars Re: not targetting superstars, I was more saying that I've found myself struggling with motivation when I consider the career path & potentially early opportunities or many of the most well-known EAs / 80,000 hours interviewees, and I think this has the utility of empowering more people who come to EA and being productive late (for example I squandered a large part of my teenage years playing video games) to make up for lost time. Superstar academics could also benefit from the techniques, but they'd be (naturally) less likely to need them due to their potentially early start in academia (I'm thinking of a Yudkowsky here) & incredible IQs. Competing with/ differentiating from Learning How To Learn Re: "Learning How To Learn" - I love that cours
What is the closest thing you know to EA that isn't EA?
Answer by TheUtilityMonsterAug 15, 20215
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Some of the charter cities movements have a similar philosophy to EA, but with more of a focus on improving governance.

In particular, I'd guess GameB is the closest to EA since it acknowledges a lot of the same X risks EA is focused on. https://www.gameb.wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page

The Seasteading Institute https://www.seasteading.org/, which promotes floating cities is also similar. It used to run Ephemerisle https://ephemerisle.github.io/, which was apparently sort of a Burning Man on water.

EA seems to interact most with the charter city community thro... (read more)

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How do you decide how much to donate in “user fees” for free services?
Answer by TheUtilityMonsterAug 05, 20212
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I don't donate to any of them. I wonder if I should be more utilitarian by not tipping at restaurants and other things along those lines. 

The cases i can think of to donate to these services would be along these 3 lines:

  1. You actually do think donating to wikipedia or X podcast etc directly or indirectly helps you enough that it is the most effective way to do good. I find it hard to imagine the direct impact of a podcast would be that big, but I can imagine a podcast leading people to make impactful career changes. In this case, it would have a similar
... (read more)
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jkmh
3y
To add on to your thoughts about argument 2: even if taking breaks with X podcaster is crucial to your personal productivity, you should still ask yourself whether X podcaster needs your money to continue podcasting. And then even if you decide they don't need your money to continue, but you really want those fuzzies from donating to X podcaster, then remember to  purchase fuzzies and utilons separately.