I also think the essays are exciting and have a good track record of convincing people. And my goal with the Handbook isn’t to avoid jargon altogether. To some extent, though, I’m trying to pack a lot of points into a smallish space, which isn’t how Eliezer’s style typically works out. Were the essay making the same points at half the length, I think it would be a better candidate.
Maybe I’ll try to produce an edited version at some point (with fewer digressions, and e.g. noting that ego depletion failed to replicate in a “Fuzzies and Utilons” footnote). But the more edits happen in a piece, the longer I expect it to take to get approval, especially from someone who doesn’t have much time to spare — another trade-off I had to consider when selecting pieces (I don’t think anything in the current series had more than a paragraph removed, unless it were printed as an excerpt).
I don’t want to push you to spend a lot of time on this, but if you’re game, would you want to suggest an excerpt from either piece (say 400 words at most) that you think gets the central point across without forcing the reader to read the whole essay? This won’t be necessary for all readers, but it’s something I’ve been aiming for.
I do expect that further material for this project will contain a lot more jargon and complexity, because it won’t be explicitly pitched as an introduction to the basic concepts of EA (and you really can’t get far in e.g. global development without digging into economics, or X-risk without getting into topics like “corrigibility”).
A note on the Thiel point: As far as I recall, his thinking on startups became a popular phenomenon only after Blake Masters published notes on his class, though I don’t know whether the notes did much to make Thiel’s thinking more clear (maybe they were just the first widely-available source of that thinking).
suggest an excerpt from either piece (say 400 words at most) that you think gets the central point across without forcing the reader to read the whole essay?
Sure thing. The M:UoC post is more like a meditation on a theme, very well written but less of a key insight than an impression of a harsh truth, so hard to extract a core argument. I’d suggest the following from the Fuzzies/Utilons post instead. (It has about a paragraph cut in the middle, symbolised by the ellipsis.)
--
If I had to give advice to some new-minted billionaire entering the realm of charity, my advice would go something like this:
To purchase warm fuzzies, find some hard-working but poverty-stricken woman who’s about to drop out of state college after her husband’s hours were cut back, and personally, but anonymously, give her a cashier’s check for $10,000. Repeat as desired.
To purchase status among your friends, donate $100,000 to the current sexiest X-Prize, or whatever other charity seems to offer the most stylishness for the least price. Make a big deal out of it, show up for their press events, and brag about it for the next five years.
Then—with absolute cold-blooded calculation—without scope insensitivity or ambiguity aversion—without concern for status or warm fuzzies—figuring out some common scheme for converting outcomes to utilons, and trying to express uncertainty in percentage probabilitiess—find the charity that offers the greatest expected utilons per dollar. Donate up to however much money you wanted to give to charity, until their marginal efficiency drops below that of the next charity on the list.
But the main lesson is that all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time… Of course, if you’re not a millionaire or even a billionaire—then you can’t be quite as efficient about things, can’t so easily purchase in bulk. But I would still say—for warm fuzzies, find a relatively cheap charity with bright, vivid, ideally in-person and direct beneficiaries. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Or just get your warm fuzzies from holding open doors for little old ladies. Let that be validated by your other efforts to purchase utilons, but don’t confuse it with purchasing utilons. Status is probably cheaper to purchase by buying nice clothes.
And when it comes to purchasing expected utilons—then, of course, shut up and multiply.
I also think the essays are exciting and have a good track record of convincing people. And my goal with the Handbook isn’t to avoid jargon altogether. To some extent, though, I’m trying to pack a lot of points into a smallish space, which isn’t how Eliezer’s style typically works out. Were the essay making the same points at half the length, I think it would be a better candidate.
Maybe I’ll try to produce an edited version at some point (with fewer digressions, and e.g. noting that ego depletion failed to replicate in a “Fuzzies and Utilons” footnote). But the more edits happen in a piece, the longer I expect it to take to get approval, especially from someone who doesn’t have much time to spare — another trade-off I had to consider when selecting pieces (I don’t think anything in the current series had more than a paragraph removed, unless it were printed as an excerpt).
I don’t want to push you to spend a lot of time on this, but if you’re game, would you want to suggest an excerpt from either piece (say 400 words at most) that you think gets the central point across without forcing the reader to read the whole essay? This won’t be necessary for all readers, but it’s something I’ve been aiming for.
I do expect that further material for this project will contain a lot more jargon and complexity, because it won’t be explicitly pitched as an introduction to the basic concepts of EA (and you really can’t get far in e.g. global development without digging into economics, or X-risk without getting into topics like “corrigibility”).
A note on the Thiel point: As far as I recall, his thinking on startups became a popular phenomenon only after Blake Masters published notes on his class, though I don’t know whether the notes did much to make Thiel’s thinking more clear (maybe they were just the first widely-available source of that thinking).
Sure thing. The M:UoC post is more like a meditation on a theme, very well written but less of a key insight than an impression of a harsh truth, so hard to extract a core argument. I’d suggest the following from the Fuzzies/Utilons post instead. (It has about a paragraph cut in the middle, symbolised by the ellipsis.)
--
If I had to give advice to some new-minted billionaire entering the realm of charity, my advice would go something like this:
To purchase warm fuzzies, find some hard-working but poverty-stricken woman who’s about to drop out of state college after her husband’s hours were cut back, and personally, but anonymously, give her a cashier’s check for $10,000. Repeat as desired.
To purchase status among your friends, donate $100,000 to the current sexiest X-Prize, or whatever other charity seems to offer the most stylishness for the least price. Make a big deal out of it, show up for their press events, and brag about it for the next five years.
Then—with absolute cold-blooded calculation—without scope insensitivity or ambiguity aversion—without concern for status or warm fuzzies—figuring out some common scheme for converting outcomes to utilons, and trying to express uncertainty in percentage probabilitiess—find the charity that offers the greatest expected utilons per dollar. Donate up to however much money you wanted to give to charity, until their marginal efficiency drops below that of the next charity on the list.
But the main lesson is that all three of these things—warm fuzzies, status, and expected utilons—can be bought far more efficiently when you buy separately, optimizing for only one thing at a time… Of course, if you’re not a millionaire or even a billionaire—then you can’t be quite as efficient about things, can’t so easily purchase in bulk. But I would still say—for warm fuzzies, find a relatively cheap charity with bright, vivid, ideally in-person and direct beneficiaries. Volunteer at a soup kitchen. Or just get your warm fuzzies from holding open doors for little old ladies. Let that be validated by your other efforts to purchase utilons, but don’t confuse it with purchasing utilons. Status is probably cheaper to purchase by buying nice clothes.
And when it comes to purchasing expected utilons—then, of course, shut up and multiply.