All of TopherHallquist's Comments + Replies

AI safety is such a new field that I don't expect you need to be a genius to do anything groundbreaking.

They claim to be working on areas like game theory, decision theory, and mathematical logic, which are all well-developed fields of study. I see no reason to think those fields have lots of low-hanging fruit that would allow average researchers to make huge breakthroughs. Sure, they have a new angle on those fields, but does a new angle really overcome their lack of an impressive research track-record?

But I expect them to be better at AI safety res

If I had to guess, I would guess FLI, given their ability to at least theoretically use the money for grant-making. Though after Elon Musk's $10 million, donation this cause area seems to be short on room for more funding.

Thanks for writing this, Michael. More people should write up documents like these. I've been thinking of doing something similar, but haven't found the time yet.

I realized reading this that I haven't thought much about REG. It sounds like they do good things, but I'm a bit skeptical re: their ability to make good use of the marginal donation they get. I don't think a small budget, by itself, is strong evidence that they could make good use of more money. Can you talk more about what convinced you that they're a good giving opportunity on the margin? (I'm ... (read more)

I was 12 when those demonstrations happened, and I'm a little fuzzy on the agenda of the protesters. I'm currently finishing up Stigliz's Gobalization and its Discontents, which while critical of the IMF, also complaints about anti-globalization activists lobbying for more protectionist measures on the part of developed countries, against goods produced in developing countries. Do you have any idea if that applies to the Seattle protests?

Question about CGD: are they optimizing for making their proposals sound boring even though in fact they ideally want huge changes from the status quo? Or do they really just think we need tweaks to the status quo?

(This is based on a very superficial glance at their site, was already planning on trying to read more of their materials.)

Hmmm... let me put it this way: I suspect the right approach to dealing with the current situation in Ukraine is to back off there, while taking a hard line re: willingness to defend Baltic NATO states like Estonia. Truly sharp red lines are established by things like the NATO treaty, not [hawkish politician X] shooting his mouth off.

I know GiveWell is aware of these articles, and has looked more into nukes. Probably more conversation notes will be coming out.

This is good to know.

Why not support the existing organizations, which have people with a lifetime of experience, scholarly background, and political connections?

Do you have any specific organizations in mind? Existing anti-nuclear weapons orgs seem focused on disarmament–which seems extremely unlikely as long as Putin (or someone like him) is in power in Russia. And existing US anti-war orgs seem tragically ineffective. Bu... (read more)

Crap, thanks. Forgot the forum uses Markdown rather than HTML.

I've been using my nominally-an-atheism-blog on Patheos for a lot of EA-related blogging, but this is sub-optimal given that lots of people find the ads and commenting system extremely annoying. My first post on the new blog is titled, The case for donating to animal rights orgs. I'm hoping that with a non-awful commenting system, we'll get lots of good discussions there.

Seconded. The post seems to imply he's setting up a non-profit for this purpose, but it would be nice to have details.

Is there any way this is a violation of the Amazon affiliates agreement?

I've come to think protein is somewhat over-rated as a concern for vegans. Unless you're trying to be a body builder, I think it's pretty easy to get enough protein through the sources mentioned in the OP (cereals and legumes are complimentary in terms of their amino acid content).

Yes, hence "or foods fortified with them." I don't particularly like soymilk, but sometimes drink calcium-fortified orange juice.

Somewhat echoing atucker: the moral ideas behind effective altruism have been around for a long time, but are also quite contrarian and have never been widely embraced. But the moral ideas—even in a form pretty damn close to their current one, like Peter Singer's writings in the 70s—aren't enough to give you EA as we know it. You also need a fair amount of expertise to come up with a strong game plan for putting them into practice. Singer couldn't have founded GiveWell, for example.

(One odd thing: as far as I know, Singer has never been involved in the nuc... (read more)

Nope. I bought Google, IBM, Microsoft, and a South American agribusiness company, all in an attempt to bet on guesses about long-term trends (information technology and maybe natural resources being really important). I'm unsure if this is a good idea—arguably I should focus on maximizing near-term expected returns—but it's something I'm doing now. For reasons Paul gave, it's at least no worse than investing in an index, but maybe I should have used the money for a larger Angel investment, I don't know.

This strongly fits with my experience. Even on a pure earnings basis, as I've researched various job opportunities I've found there's a shocking amount of variation on how much two job opportunities can differ, much more than I initially anticipated based on a naive view of what a competitive job market looks like. Often this pops up in non-obvious ways.

Actually examples that might happen to you: one finance firm turns out to be much better about paying bonuses to new employees who make big contributions right away. Or maybe Google only offers you slightl... (read more)

As someone who received a Large Sum of Money (as defined in this post) last year, here's what I actually did with it:

• spent some of it on my living expenses while I acquired skills to get a new job, then looked for a job
• invested it in Vanguard index funds
• donated a small portion of it
• spent more of it on living expenses when I decided to quit my job and look for a new one
• and most recently did a calculation regarding what I thought I could afford to lose, and invested that much money in individual stocks plus some in a startup founded by member of the r

I think the answer to your first question is mostly contained in my response to Owen. I agree that in theory cosmopolitans might disagree on immigration reform, but I chose not to talk much about it because I thought talking about cosmopolitanism and military intervention was more interesting.

For your second question, yeah, I would want to apply cosmopolitanism to cities, too. Though drill down to very small groups, and I'm less eager to take a hard stance. Bryan Caplan thinks we have special obligations to family members, but that has

Maybe I should wrap some of these comments up into a clarifying addendum.

When I was writing this post, I meant to define cosmopolitanism as something that does not take a position either way on nonhumans or future generations. Two reasons for this:

1. My goal was to increase self-awareness about concern for people in other countries being a distinctive feature of effective altruism. Whereas people who are especially concerned about animals or future generations tend to already be pretty self-aware that not everyone shares their position.
2. As Robert Wiblin noted in his summit talk, the effective altruism community does have a few p