All of Tom_Ash's Comments + Replies

I think the Utilitarian arguments you presented are quite strong, such as precommiting to certain principles being very advantageous, but surely they're not infinitely advantageous right? A few billion is quite a lot.

To the people voting 'disagree', what OP said above is clearly true. Perhaps people are taking it to imply that the utilitarian course of action here is correct, but I see no such implication.

I think a better forum norm would be for someone to comment spelling out the perceived implication and why they disagree with it, and have other people upvote that. 

It's interesting that (being from the Guardian), that article presents the story as being a scandal, with the implication that Cummings was being corrupt. 

I don't know the answer to that myself, but if you find it out and let me know I'd be happy to update the guide.

Thanks for doing this Richenda!

Is anyone familiar with the philosophical literature on that? My understanding is that it's controversial.

Separately, what's the connection to moral realism?

Yes, the .impact team (particular Patrick Brinich-Langlois) have been working on this for a little while, and it's long been part of our to do list for the forum.

(There's a whole set up procedure for them that they follow, including there being once a month. It's part of their procedure for doing the EA Newsletter to post an open thread with its contents at the same time. What sort of a board member are you not knowing every single detail? :p ;) )

Yes, the .impact team has the details - probably neatest if I don't post it here!

When we did them once a month they got only a few comments, but I'd say that's no problem and they're still helpful. We added that link to them in the sidebar, so that's a reason to keep them up. We should change the intro text to explicitly welcome people new to EA with any sorts of questions or observations.

Great post - thanks Georgie!

Good catch, that was in from before we switched to AMF and away from CauseVox!

This stuff is genuinely tricky, and I'm deeply aware of that! Does deworming increase population though? My guess is it might even decrease it. Remember that my concerns are slightly different than Michael's, and focused on the general difficulty of knowing how and why deaths are bad, making me want to prioritise easing suffering (and increasing welfare).

Probably not! We plan to use an off-the-shelf service from somewhere like Vanguard in the US or the UK's Charities Aid Foundation if we do this at all, but even so.

Good luck! I think having a set of material which doesn't make EA (or effective giving) seem too demanding is very sensible - even though the three people you've started with, all of whom I know, definitely seem like "full time" EAs, to use the least-bad terminology people could come up with when this was last discussed on the forum!

(*For my part, I'm unsure of my credence that I can, but if forced to pick one I'd put it at below 50%, though that's for various reasons which are quite idiosyncratic to me.)

I'm interested as to different people's views on whether they can beat the wisdom of the EA crowds on this.* Those who think they can't might theoretically want to give to a portfolio of charities based on a particular crowd's pick. We've been talking about collaborating with Michael Page to make something like this happen, though my purely personal estimate is that it won't happen any time soon, and I'm not sure how many people would donate to certain sorts of portfolios - that'd also be interesting to hear!

Are there actually infoboxes? Where? I don't see them - all I see is manually centered links at the top of e.g. http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/index.php?title=Library/Giving_What_We_Can

I thought you might like to know that, after a few days' thought and discussion, this reminder of my population ethics concerns has made me switch my donations from AMF to SCI; I originally favoured this over life-saving interventions for population ethics reasons back in 2010, six years ago. (My concerns are slightly broader ones about the difficulty of knowing how and why deaths are bad - without doubting that they are - but I don't have time to go into them any time soon.)

Here's giving a shoutout to Giving What We Can for making their calculations for the lifetime value of a member public - I've been finding them very useful recently for evaluating the value of projects!

This is in fact already one of our focus projects! The list is at https://impact.hackpad.com/Projects-aRiPtncmuKS

Here are some new organisational blogs added on Pablo's site:

• AI Impacts
• Animal Ethics
• Centre for the Study of Existential Risk
• Charity Entrepreneurship
• Effective Altruism UNSW
• Foundational Research Institute
• GBS Switzerland
• Global Catastrophic Risk Institute
• Intentional Insights
• Open Philanthropy Project
• Sentience Politics
• Stiftung für Effektiven Altruismus

Good question. It's easiest to answer in money terms: a very rough answer is $80 (which buys 7 hours non-management staff time at $6.46 an hour, plus the volunteer time we can parlay that into, plus some management time). That includes a healthy amount of safety buffer. If anyone would like to donate it, they could contact peter@peterhurford.com

Thanks, I'll get the current CS team to look into this!

Can you tell us roughly what income you're looking at through ETG? :)

Thanks Gleb! Anyone else who wanted to share this (and others' job postings) would also be helping out.

Yep, you'll be in the queue and everyone will hear about interviews, etc. at roughly the same time. :)

Given that the top 1% in the US have a household income of $400,000, I'd strongly favour earning to give. The most relevant post on this is Peter Hurford thinks that a large proportion of people should earn to give long term (the second most upvoted article here ever).

I find it difficult for example when dealing with a large number of emails on a variety of topics.

Batching email on similar topics can help. But I don't think it's worth the time except when it feels like the batching is efficient on its own merits.

Ouch, and she studied English at Cambridge! Those Oxbridge degrees aren't all they're cracked up to be. :p

For those already in Vancouver (or who know people who are), here's flagging that you'd maximise your chances if we heard from you as soon as possible.

One issue is the possibility that better research is more likely to bring in more funding than explicitly focusing on fundraising or outreach. This is somewhat supported by the much larger amount of funding that an organization like GW has moved (compared to Charity Science). We are currently very uncertain about whether this is true or not and can see a strong case for both viewpoints.

We can't straightforwardly work out how valuable future (marginal) research by GiveWell or others is, as this seems quite different from the value of their historic research and basic maintenance of this. My personal sense is that outreach is more valuable at this point, though that's of course uncertain.

That's covered here:

Although the specific details of staff’s backup plans are confidential, the co-founder estimates of the total counterfactual impact of Charity Science employees/volunteers are close to ~$500k at the upper bound for all current combined staff/volunteer counterfactuals over the last 2.5 years. This number is extremely soft and based on limited evidence. Using this estimate one could up the counterfactuals included costs of Charity Science to $580k

We'll share the full results soon, including all non-confidential raw data. :)

LEAN is capturing it in our annual questionnaire for group organizers, and also our monitoring and evaluation of meetup.com accounts in particular (many of which we provide).

LEAN is capturing it in our annual questionnaire for group organizers.

I'm sympathetic to that position in the domestic context. But what about when the owners of companies (e.g. multinationals or shareholder-owned companies) are in the developed world yet make many of their profits in the developing world? We might well want developing countries to capture some of that tax.

Interesting piece. Improving taxation (particularly of large/multinational companies) in the developing world is interesting and possibly neglected. It'd at least be interesting to see how tractable it is and how one would go about working on it. It fits well with the fact that EAs are typically more radically cosmopolitan than the leftists who criticise them for ignoring domestic taxation and wealth inequalities, and could provide a good comeback to these.

See also Sören Mindermann's description of full-time and part-time paid job opportunities at .impact: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/pw/working_at_ea_organizations_series_impact/

See also Joseph Kijewski's description of his experience interning with .impact and what this involves: http://effective-altruism.com/ea/r7/internships_with_impact_my_experience/

Yep, it's not repetitive and will contain fresh information in publications like a newspaper!

What's the count up to now, counting all sources?

materialism/physicalism [...] is mostly uncontroversial now among [...] philosophers

That's not really true. For example, in the PhilPapers survey, only 56.5% accepted physicalism in philosophy of mind (though 16.4% chose 'Other'). There's no knock-down argument for physicalism.

I can't access the facebook group, is it public?

You have to join to see posts.

What tools for prediction markets are there besides http://predictionbook.com/ ? Any comments on what features they have or which are best for which purposes?

The only other one I know of is https://called.it/ which is mobile only (h/t John Maxwell).

People may be interested in https://www.facebook.com/groups/eapredictons/

With 75% confidence I’d say that by February 10th at least 15 people will have expressed interest in predictions about effective altruism.

I hereby express interest. Others can do so in a comment under this!

[Here's some introductory verbiage so nothing hooky shows up under 'Recent comments']

ATTENTION: please read this:

To help us test how many people see comments on the month's open thread when it's got old, please upvote this comment if you see it. (I promise to use the karma wisely.)

Evan/Leo/Jacy, could you add a description of how to join to http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/index.php?title=Discussion_groups ?

(Does anyone see open threads this late? Say if so!)

I just found out that the Open Philanthropy Project funded http://waitlistzero.org/ which was a small charity started by two EAs who I worked with in its early days. OPP gave $200k, presumably covering Waitlist Zero's whole budget (way more than it used to be).

This suggests more people creating charities could get fully funded by OPP. Does anyone have any insight into this? Claire Zabel of GiveWell/OPP said:

It's possible. It's best if the organization fits into one of our focus areas (openphilanthropy.o

Also, whatever happened to the self help group...?

It still exists! It's linked from that wiki page - I believe the admins Evan, Leo and Jacy have to approve new people.

I didn't downvote, but for what it's worth I think this may be a bit niche and of tangential relevance to be a top level post on the EA Forum. The 'EA Hangout' or investment Facebook groups would be better fits - see http://wiki.effectivealtruismhub.com/index.php?title=Discussion_groups . People would likely be interested there. I hope this is helpful feedback!