All of Vhanon's Comments + Replies
The improving institutional decision-making (IIDM) working group (now the Effective Institutions Project) ran a survey asking members of the EA community which topics they thought were in scope of “improving institutional decision-making” (IIDM) as a cause area. 74 individuals participated.
I have the impression you asked people: is discussing about dogs or cats in the scope of improving decision in animal welfare? I would be very surprised if somebody did disagree.
That is a pity you stop at the presentation of the results. I believe the interes... (read more)
Idealizing subjectivism: X is intrinsically valuable, relative to an agent A, if and only if, and because, A would have some set of evaluative attitudes towards X, if A had undergone some sort of idealization procedure.
I feel you've been discussing how confusing the consequences of the definition above are. Then, why don't you just drop the definition and revise it?
I would propose: X is intrinsically valuable, relative to an agent A belonging to a close-influence set of agents S, if and only if, and because, A and all the agents in S would have some ... (read more)
That is a very nice bibliography exploration software.
May I ask you what the 2D dimensions of the graph represent?
Are they dimensions of maximal variance obtained from principal component analysis or are they two specific properties?
Do you think it could be helpful to publish the weight of the dimensions along side the graph?
What about the number of the articles, what dictates what is included and what is excluded?
Is there any way to include or exclude more articles?
What data are you using for the categorisation? Is this all objective dat... (read more)
Your definition of moral catastrophe is based on historical measurable effects. It does not take into account internal human experiences, and it does not completely represent those subtle changes of human thinking and behaviours that could be considered immoral. I would argue that the moral catastrophe is already in small every day immoral choices that slowly creep in the mind of people and become normal patterns of thinking.
There are moral catastrophe that lead to multiple catastrophic events like the idea of race superiority that eventually leads t... (read more)
In a way, this is similar to ineffective philantropy in general - perhaps "ineffective grantmaking" would be an appropriate heading?
That sounds a better heading indeed. Although grantmakers define the value of a research outcome, they might not be able to correctly promote their vision due to their limited resources.
However, as the grantmaking process is what defines the value of a research, your heading might be misinterpreted as the inability to define valuable outcomes (which is in contradiction with your working hypothesis)
What about "inefficient... (read more)
I/we would love to get input on this mapping [...] ii. any of the problems described here is overstated.
Point 2.3 "founding priorities of grantmakers " does not sound a problem to me in the context of your analysis. In the opening of your post, you show concern in the production of a valuable results:
Instead, I will just assume that when we dedicate resources to research we are expecting some form of valuable outcome or impact.
Who is supposed to define the valuable outcome if not a grantmaker? Are you perhaps saying that specific grantmakers a... (read more)
On the other hand, making evaluations public is more informative for readers, who may acquire better models of reality if the evaluations are correct,
I am in agreement. Please, let me note that people can still get a good model of reality even if they do not know the names of the people involved.
If evaluations did not contain the name of the subjects, do you think it would still be easy for readers to connect the evaluation to the organisations being evaluated? Perhaps you could frame the evaluation so that links are not clear.
... (read more)or be able to poi
If that's not what organization like the FLI are for, what's are they for?
They do their best to gather data, predict events on the base of the data and give recommendations. However data is not perfect, models are not a perfect representation of reality, and recommendations are not necessarily unanimous. To err is human, and mistakes are possible, especially when the foundation of the applied processes contain errors.
Sometimes people just do not have enough information, and certainly nobody can gather information if data does not exist. Still a decis... (read more)
Why didn't the big EA organizations listen more?
I realise the article excerpt you showed is not an accurate estimation. Marc and Thomas also say:
... (read more)The record of laboratory incidents and accidental infections in biosafety level 3 (BSL3) laboratories provides a starting point for quantifying risk. Concentrating on the generation of transmissible variants of avian influenza, we provide an illustrative calculation of the sort that would be performed in greater detail in a fuller risk analysis. Previous publications have suggested similar approaches to this
Your question:
Answer from the post:
I think the emphasis is on the relationship with the EA community. You do not need to be an EA-dedicated consultancy team, but you should have some group dedicated to serving EA inter... (read more)