All of vipulnaik's Comments + Replies

In my reading of the post and the appendix, the point Kat seemed to be making was not that professional assistants would be cheaper, but that professional assistants would have a better upfront idea of what they were getting into, and therefore be less likely to retroactively feel that this was a bad decision. This is consistent with the idea that having that upfront idea could also come with demanding higher compensation upfront before entering into the arrangement; what Kat was trying to guard against was regretting it after agreeing to it.

In a section o... (read more)

I agree with the points made in this comment. It's important to remember that people getting dogpiled on can feel pretty awful about it. It reminded me of this Sam Harris podcast interview with a documentary fillmmaker who described her experience of being "cancelled" as being worse than her experience of being kidnapped.

That said, I don't know how well they address the original comment they're replying to. The post we're looking at was posted three months after the impetus for it, so while I do see that the whole experience is very stressful and can make ... (read more)

Sorry I wasn't clear. I mean that I haven't seen him confirm publicly that he told them that he will or might pay them. The place you linked just talks about his draft plan of what he was thinking of doing (offering money). If he didn't offer money to them, and they had no other indirect indication (until the process was over) that he was going to give them money, then there would be very little distortionary effect.

My original comment left a pretty wide window of possibilities open, and your reply falls within that window, so I don't quite think we disagree a lot. However, in the spirit of nitpicking, I'll make a couple of points:

• Prominence of disclosure matters. The fact that Ben included the information in his post shows that he didn't intend to hide it; nonetheless, my sense is that he didn't highlight it as a disclosure / disclaimer / caveat for readers to keep in mind when interpreting the post. He did include other disclaimers around his process and motivati

Thanks. I don't see any confirmation from him of actually offering to pay upfront, so barring that further evidence I would not read anything too definite from this.

One area where Ben didn't follow investigative journalism "best practices" (that I had missed early on, but saw mentioned in Kat's post, and went back and checked) was that he financially compensated his sources ($5,000 each, or $10,000 total). This is frowned upon pretty heavily in investigative journalism (see e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chequebook_journalism). I don't have any reason to believe this meaningfully distorted the outcomes here (for instance, if the sources had no indication right until the end that Ben would compensate them financia... (read more)

[NOTE: This comment is specifically about things that Nonlinear could have done better after the employees in question had left the organization. This is not intended to connote that others were faultless; I'm just focusing on things from Nonlinear's perspective for the purpose of this comment. Also, I am assuming the essential truth of the information Nonlinear has shared, again for the sake of argument.]

One thing I would have suggested Nonlinear do differently in the past few months, after getting clear information that Alice/Chloe were spreading informa... (read more)

Thanks! I'm guessing many people would have incorrectly guessed it was intentional (as I did) so I'm happy you fixed this.

Also, I think that not linking to Ben's post near the top can come across as bad form. I fully understand the desire to not link to a post you consider to be making false and misleading claims, and I also expect readers to have no problem locating the original post, so I expect the lack of a link to not matter materially. But it does come across as bad form (Ben's post has been updating to link to yours, so there is now a clear asymmetry).

For the most part, an initial reading of this post and the linked documents did have the intended effect on me of making me view many of the original claims as likely false or significantly exaggerated. With that said, my suggestion would have been to remove some sorts of stuff from the post and keep it only in the linked documents or follow-up posts. In particular, I'd say:

• The photos provide a bit of information, but can be viewed as distracting and misleading. I think the value of information they provide is probably sufficient for their inclusion in a

You can probably remove the ?fbclid=.... from the link. That's a click id added by Facebook for its own tracking.

Hmmm, this doesn't seem to include the breakdown by funder (Jaan Tallinn and Future of Life Institute) for each grant. I think I can reverse-engineer the amounts per funder by superimposing this and https://futureoflife.org/grant-program/2023-grants/ + https://jaan.online/philanthropy/donations.html but I'm wondering why the breakdown wasn't included in SFF's grant page?

Somehow I missed your reply originally; I've updated my comment to correct the author name of the post.

Thanks, I've updated my post reflecting this and citing your answer.

Thanks! Sebastian added one row about Luna (the very first in the timeline) based on this feedback. The timeline of FTX (i.e., not the collapse but FTX itself) may eventually have more coverage of the LUNA episode and its implications for FTX, but that timeline is currently in very early stages.

Good point! My understanding is that SBF's argument was that the right thing to average wasn't serial rounds of oneself (where the money to play with would be determined by past rounds), but parallel-universe versions of oneself (i.e., of 100 parallel universes with SBF trying his strategy, what % would lead to him being super-rich?).

Wow, you made pretty much the same points (albeit with slightly different emphases) as I did in my comment https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RyRhT6EQjJgcwYmtd/popular-personal-financial-advice-versus-the-professors?commentId=uDdooGQDbXwnBiieW

I'm pretty sympathetic to the general idea of consumption smoothing over time based on one's expected average lifetime income; in particular, I think there are often cases where people are unnecessarily miserly with their money at a younger age in order to hit a certain saving rate, which isn't optimal for them.

However, one very important angle that informs a lot of this is the fact that we don't have efficient capital markets, which specifically here means that people don't have frictionless access to unlimited amounts of credit. This means that there's ... (read more)

Thanks! I think what you said is correct from the viewpoint of individual donees -- an individual donee isn't guaranteed to get all or most of the donation of a donee at a high level. Though especially in the EA community it's probably true that donors donating large sums of money in total will usually donate nontrivial sums per donee if they donate at all (for instance, a level 5 donor is unlikely to make donations of just $100 to things they deem as the most effective uses of money, because marginal value functions rarely cross that quickly). I don't have rigorous data to back this up and maybe I'm wrong about it.

Title should say CCP not CPP?

The footer on your site says to post any questions as public comments on this post, so here goes (this is not directly related to the content of this post):

I noticed that a $470,000 grant to Charity Entrepreneurship, that was visible on your site as recently as August 31 (see http://web.archive.org/web/20220831210840/https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/), is now no longer visible on your grants page. What happened to the grant?

I also noticed that https://ftxfuturefund.org/our-grants/ lists a grant to Michael Robkin, but that this grant is not listed at ei... (read more)

Good point. My understanding is that Open Phil made a general decision to focus only on US policy for most of their policy areas, for the reason that there are high fixed costs to getting familiar with a policy space. In some areas like animal welfare they've gone beyond US policy, but those are areas where they are spending way more money.

Their grants to Labor Mobility Partnerships stand out as not being US-specific, though LaMP is still currently more focused on the US.

I do expect that if there are shovel-ready, easy-to-justify opportunities outside the US, Open Phil would take them.

Hello! I'm wondering what implications the switch to rolling applications has on how payout reports are published? https://funds.effectivealtruism.org/funds/far-future#payout-reports doesn't include anything beyond April 1, 2021. Previously there would be three reports per year tied to the (discrete) grant rounds.

Hi Darius!

I appreciate that you've raised this issue and provided a reasonably thorough discussion of it. I would like to highlight a bunch of aspects based on my experience editing Wikipedia as well as studying its culture in some depth. While the paid editing phase and the subsequent fallout inform my views partly, these are actually based on several years of experience before (and some after) that incident.

While none of what I say falsifies what you wrote, it is in tension with some of your tone and emphasis. So in some ways these observations are criti... (read more)

Hi Linch! I have a loose summary of my sponsored Wikipedia editing efforts at https://vipulnaik.com/sponsored-wikipedia-editing/ that I have just updated to include more information and links.

For third-party coverage of the incident, check out https://web.archive.org/web/20170625001549/http://en.kingswiki.com/wiki/Vipulgate -- I'm linking to Wayback Machine since that wiki seems to no longer exist; also a warning that the site's general viewpoints are redpill, which might be a dealbreaker for some readers. But this particular article seems reasonably well... (read more)

The link https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yMwpoiREvRyNbMjG8/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds for Takeoff Speeds Discussion is erroring. It looks like the correct, public link is https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/vwLxd6hhFvPbvKmBH/yudkowsky-and-christiano-discuss-takeoff-speeds

It looks like the NIST randomness beacon will be back in time for the draw date of the lottery. https://www.nist.gov/programs-projects/nist-randomness-beacon says "NIST will reopen at 6:00 AM on Monday, January 28, 2019."

Might it make sense to return to the NIST randomness beacon for the drawing?

The comments on naming beliefs by Hal Finney (2008) appears to be how the consensus around the impressions/beliefs distinction began to form (the commenters include such movers and shakers as Eliezer and Anna Salamon).

Also, impression track records by Katja (September 2017) recent blog post/article circulated in the rationalist community that revived the terminology.

Still think so, in light of the heated discussion in the comments at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/1g3/why_how_to_make_progress_on_diversity_inclusion/ ?

Against Malaria Foundation was started by a guy who had some business and marketing experience but no global health chops. It is now a GiveWell top charity

https://issarice.com/against-malaria-foundation

https://timelines.issarice.com/wiki/Timeline_of_Against_Malaria_Foundation

Disclosure: I funded the creation of the latter page, which inspired the creation of the former.

I'm not sure why you brought up the downvoting in your reply to my reply to your comment, rather than replying directly to the downvoted comment. To be clear, though, I did not downvote the comment, ask others to downvote the comment, or hear from others saying they had downvoted the comment.

Also, I could (and should) have been clearer that I was focusing only on points that I didn't see covered in the post, rather than providing an exhaustive list of points. I generally try to comment with marginal value-add rather than reiterating things already mentione... (read more)

I tried to avoid things that have already been discussed heavily and publicly in the community, and I think the math/philosopher angle is one that is often mentioned in the context of EA not being diverse enough. The post itself notes:

"""people who are both that and young, white, cis-male, upper middle class, from men-dominated fields, technology-focused, status-driven, with a propensity for chest-beating, overconfidence, narrow-picture thinking/micro-optimization, and discomfort with emotions."""

This also mentioned in the pos... (read more)

"I take your point that skews can happen, but it seems a bit suspicious to me that desire to be effective and altruistic should be so heavily skewed towards straight, white dudes."

(1) Where did "straight" come into this picture? The author says that EAs are well-represented on sexual diversity (and maybe even overrepresented on some fairly atypical sexual orientations), and my comment (and the data I used) had nothing to say about sexual orientation?

(2) """it seems a bit suspicious to me that desire to be effective and al... (read more)

I find it interesting that most of the examples given in the article conform to mainstream, politically correct opinion about who is and isn't overrepresented. A pretty similar article could be written about e.g. math graduate students with almost the exact list of overrepresented and underrepresented groups. In that sense it doesn't seem to get to the core of what unique blind spots or expansion problems EA might have.

An alternate perspective would be to look at minorities, subgroups, and geographical patterns that are way overrepresented in EAs relative ... (read more)

You report EA as being 70% male. How unusual is that for a skew? One comparison point for this, for which data is easily abundant, is readerships of websites that are open-to-read (no entry criteria, no member fees). Looking at the distribution of such websites, 70% seems like a relatively low end of skew. For instance, Politico and The Hill, politics news sites, see 70-75% male audiences (https://www.quantcast.com/politico.com#demographicsCard and https://www.quantcast.com/thehill.com#demographicsCard) whereas nbc.com, a mainstream TV, entertainment, and ... (read more)

Related: Top posts on LessWrong 1.0: http://lesswrong.com/lw/owa/lesswrong_analytics_february_2009_to_january_2017/

Mirror of the same post on LW 2.0 (but still top posts _of_ LW 1.0): https://www.lesserwrong.com/posts/SWNn53RryQgTzT7NQ/lesswrong-analytics-february-2009-to-january-2017

Disclosure: I sponsored work on this post.

Also related: https://www.facebook.com/vipulnaik.r/posts/10211030780941382

Thanks for the detailed post, Roxanne! I am a little confused by the status of the recipients and the way these grants are treated by recipients from an accounting/tax perspective.

First off, are all the grants made to individuals only, or are some of them made to corporations (such as nonprofits)? Your spreadsheet lists all the recipients as individuals, but the descriptions of the grants suggest that in at least some cases, the money is actually going to an organization that is (probably) incorporated. Three examples: Oliver Habryka for LessWrong 2.0 (whi... (read more)

It now went from 20,000 to 200,000. Is that what you intended? My crude calculation yields a number closer to 20,000 than 200,000.

I'm following up regarding this :).

The subreddit stats used to be public (or rather, moderators could choose to make them public) but that option was removed by Reddit a few months ago.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/6atvgi/upcoming_changes_view_counts_users_here_now_and/

I discussed Reddit stats a little bit in this article: https://www.wikihow.com/Understand-Your-Website-Traffic-Variation-with-Time

I have been using PredictionBook for recording predictions related to GiveWell money moved; see http://effective-altruism.com/ea/xn/givewell_money_moved_in_2015_a_review_of_my/#predictions-for-2016 for links to the predictions. Unfortunately searching on PredictionBook itself does not turn up all the predictions because they use Google, which does not index all pages or at least doesn't surface them in search results.

Do you foresee any changes being made to the moderation guidelines on the forum? Now that CEA's brand name is associated with it, do you think that could mean forbidding the posting of content that is deemed "not helpful" to the movement, similar to what we see on the Effective Altruists Facebook group?

If there are no anticipated changes to the moderation guidelines, how do you anticipate CEA navigating reputational risks from controversial content posted to the forum?

Thanks again for writing about the situation of the EA Funds, and thanks also to the managers of the individual funds for sharing their allocations and the thoughts behind it. In light of the new information, I want to raise some concerns regarding the Global Health and Development fund.

My main concern about this fund is that it's not really a "Global Health and Development" fund -- it's much more GiveWell-centric than global health- and development-centric. The decision to allocate all fund money to GiveWell's top charity reinforces some of my c... (read more)

I appreciate the information being posted here, in this blog post, along with all the surrounding context. However, I don't see the information on these grants on the actual EA Funds website. Do you plan to maintain a grants database on the EA Funds website, and/or list all the grants made from each fund on the fund page (or linked to from it)? That way anybody can check in at any time to see how how much money has been raised, and how much has been allocated and where.

The Open Philanthropy Project grants database might be a good model, though your needs may differ somewhat.

Public link with up-to-date data https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/about/traffic

Commenting here to avoid a misconception that some readers of this post might have. I wasn't trying to "spread effective altruism" to any community with these editing efforts, least of all the Wikipedia community (it's also worth noting that the Wikipedia community that participates in these debates is basically disjoint from the people who actually read those specific pages in practice -- many of the latter don't even have Wikipedia accounts).

Some of the editing activities were related to effective altruism in these two ways: (1) The pages we e... (read more)

Great points! (An upvote wasn't enough appreciation, hence the comment as well).

Hi Dony,

The submission doesn't qualify as serious, and was past the deadline. So we won't be considering it.