Those who downvoted this: how do you think we’re supposed to make good strategic decisions without having a forthright discussion of the pros and cons of different approaches? See others’ much harsher versions of this argument!
I think the issue with your comment was that someone said “I want to do some good, can anyone help me?” and your response reads as”oh, well, you and your type don’t seem as smart or important as another group of people” which seemed needlessly rude to me. I say it was needless because, pace your follow up comment, there was no strategic decision to make; it wasn’t as if the decision was to help fundraise from athletes or poker places, but just a request for assistance relevant to the former group.
Hey Ryan, I didn’t downvote; but was somewhat annoyed after the first paragraph. I don’t have anything against the second and the third; I actually like them especially the third one.
Intuitively, I didn’t like your first reaction because it feels too stereotypical: “athletes are dumb.” Also, your argument presupposes that high intelligence is needed to engage/understand EA ideas, which feels a bit cringy [as it is sort of self-praising].
I think these considerations might be valid, but they don’t feel decisive. [I think they would be fine as a part of a larger discussion about pros/cons or how to do outreach to athletes better. Also, lately, I become much more confused about good conversational norms…]
OK, that’s interesting, but it’s not what said: that brains do help with being a good sportsperson—they’re just not a predominant feature, as in poker!
Re intelligence, well, no it’s not necessary for engaging with EA (I didn’t say it was). But it obviously helps—a lot of EA-fans are at top universities, and smarts also help with figuring out how to do good.
Is the poker-vs-sport difference decisive? Well, poker is an extremely frustrating and difficult game/sport. A top pro-player can lose money for months, due to the swings involved. It’s much easier than in sport to go on tilt. Dealing with such uncertainty is exactly the sort of thing that can help with thinking impassively about uncertain philanthropic interventions. So maybe!
I’d push back on the last paragraph here—granted, some sports are salary based and relatively financially secure from year to year. Tennis and many other individual sports are the opposite and purely based on how many matches you win. Given the huge expenses inherent in flying to tournaments and hiring coaches, many weeks are break-even or losses, even at the highest level. If dealing with this sort of uncertainty helps with EA alignment then it bodes well for approaching athletes from many individual sports.
Makes sense! How people deal with the uncertainty could also be informative. If they talk about calculating the expected value (in earnings) of a tournament, or expected points won from a shot, or get excited about sport statisticians’ work generally—then that would be extra-encouraging.
I personally wouldn’t pay that much attention to the particular language people use—it’s more highly correlated with their local culture than with abilities or interests. I’d personally be extra excited to talk to someone with a strong track record of handling uncertainty well who had a completely different vocabulary than me, although I’d also expect it to take more effort to get to the payoff.
Sure, I think your views are much more nuanced (sorry, I didn’t make it clear). The items I listed are kinda my low-effort impression; in the same mode, I could be tricked into believing the post is written by a mediocre writer when it is actually written by GPT-3). These impressions caused annoyance.
[At this point, I might be overthinking it; forgot how I actually felt.]
I didn’t downvote, but the analysis seems incorrect to me: most pro athletes are highly intelligent, and in terms of single attributes that predict success in subsequent difficult endeavors I can’t think of much better; I’d probably take it over successful startup CEO even. It also seems like the sort of error that’s particularly costly to make for reasons of overall social dynamics and biases.
Good point. I think I’d rather clarify/revise my claims to: 1) pro athletes will be somewhat less interested in EA than poker players, mostly due to different thinking styles, and 2) many/most pro athletes are highly generally capable but their comparative advantage won’t usually be donating tournament winnings or doing research. Something like promoting disarmament, or entering politics could be. But it needs way more thought.
Thanks! 1 seems believable to me, at least for EA as it currently presents. 2 seems believable on average but I’d expect a lot of heterogeneity (I personally know athletes who have gone on to be very good researchers). It also seems like donations are pretty accessible to everyone, as you can piggyback on other people’s research.
Just saw this now and strong-upvoted it; as one of the REG cofounders, I agree with your first point. (I actually kind of disagree with your second point – the poker industry often plays up how rich poker pros actually are, and the poker pros play along, but in reality many aren’t that wealthy as it seems.)
I also didn’t downvote but the first bullet point comes across really badly, and that’s speaking as someone who’s had considerably more success in poker than sport. My guess is that the downvotes are because of that.
Like Mischa, I think it’s easily read as cringy and self congratulatory i.e.
“thanks for trying but I’m not sure you’re smart enough to join our cause.”
If I’d wanted to make that point, I’d probably have gone for something like:
> (probably as the third point) “however, I think that outreach to sportspeople might be much harder than to poker pros. Some EA ideas are quite counterintuitive, and there’s a lot of very similar reasoning in poker/EA, while in general I wouldn’t expect pro sports people to be as familiar with things like expected value reasoning”.
Seperately to why this was downvoted, I think your second bullet point is wrong. I expect that the top few earners in sport are at least an order of magnitude better off than in poker, and the set {pro sportspeople} earns at least three orders of magnitude more in total than {poker pros}.
Yes, the very richest sportspeople have ~$1B to poker players’ ~$0.1B. But the top sportspeople are rarer in their talents because ~100x more people try to play e.g. soccer than poker. Pro sport seems to pays less well than poker for any given level of talent. In order to equal the donations of poker players, you might have to get players who are quite elite and famous, or assemble a group across different sports. Whereas for poker it’s a tight-knit group of unknown nerds—easier to do!
I’m not sure why you’re dividing by the number of people who try to play sport? If you include in your definition of “poker pro” everyone who plays poker, on average they are losing money.
I’d be prepared to bet that, counting “earner” as “someone with positive lifetime earnings”, the nth highest earner in sport is making more than the nth highest earner in poker for all n.
What you divide by just depends what question you’re trying to answer.
I don’t think we really want to know about the total earnings, or the earnings of a player with a particular ranking, as these would assume that you can capture some large fraction, or some top-tier part of the total market. On those measures, “all people” is the best pool to recruit from.
More interesting questions [if you’re trying to raise donations] are things like “what are the average earnings?” or “how well-paid is an individual with a certain level of extraordinariness?”. If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player, then the soccer players are more sparse, more famous, and harder to recruit than equivalently rich poker players.
As a data point, I downvoted the original comment but removed the downvote after reading the edited version, which I think is phrased a lot better.
In cases where a comment is edited after other comments critique it, I wonder if we should gently encourage a norm of having the removed words be crossed out, rather than deleted entirely? It is of course an author’s right to remove anything they no longer endorse, but it can be confusing to see comments refer to material that no longer exists.
Those who downvoted this: how do you think we’re supposed to make good strategic decisions without having a forthright discussion of the pros and cons of different approaches? See others’ much harsher versions of this argument!
I think the issue with your comment was that someone said “I want to do some good, can anyone help me?” and your response reads as”oh, well, you and your type don’t seem as smart or important as another group of people” which seemed needlessly rude to me. I say it was needless because, pace your follow up comment, there was no strategic decision to make; it wasn’t as if the decision was to help fundraise from athletes or poker places, but just a request for assistance relevant to the former group.
Hey Ryan, I didn’t downvote; but was somewhat annoyed after the first paragraph. I don’t have anything against the second and the third; I actually like them especially the third one.
Intuitively, I didn’t like your first reaction because it feels too stereotypical: “athletes are dumb.” Also, your argument presupposes that high intelligence is needed to engage/understand EA ideas, which feels a bit cringy [as it is sort of self-praising].
I think these considerations might be valid, but they don’t feel decisive. [I think they would be fine as a part of a larger discussion about pros/cons or how to do outreach to athletes better. Also, lately, I become much more confused about good conversational norms…]
OK, that’s interesting, but it’s not what said: that brains do help with being a good sportsperson—they’re just not a predominant feature, as in poker!
Re intelligence, well, no it’s not necessary for engaging with EA (I didn’t say it was). But it obviously helps—a lot of EA-fans are at top universities, and smarts also help with figuring out how to do good.
Is the poker-vs-sport difference decisive? Well, poker is an extremely frustrating and difficult game/sport. A top pro-player can lose money for months, due to the swings involved. It’s much easier than in sport to go on tilt. Dealing with such uncertainty is exactly the sort of thing that can help with thinking impassively about uncertain philanthropic interventions. So maybe!
I’d push back on the last paragraph here—granted, some sports are salary based and relatively financially secure from year to year. Tennis and many other individual sports are the opposite and purely based on how many matches you win. Given the huge expenses inherent in flying to tournaments and hiring coaches, many weeks are break-even or losses, even at the highest level. If dealing with this sort of uncertainty helps with EA alignment then it bodes well for approaching athletes from many individual sports.
Makes sense! How people deal with the uncertainty could also be informative. If they talk about calculating the expected value (in earnings) of a tournament, or expected points won from a shot, or get excited about sport statisticians’ work generally—then that would be extra-encouraging.
I personally wouldn’t pay that much attention to the particular language people use—it’s more highly correlated with their local culture than with abilities or interests. I’d personally be extra excited to talk to someone with a strong track record of handling uncertainty well who had a completely different vocabulary than me, although I’d also expect it to take more effort to get to the payoff.
Sure, I think your views are much more nuanced (sorry, I didn’t make it clear). The items I listed are kinda my low-effort impression; in the same mode, I could be tricked into believing the post is written by a mediocre writer when it is actually written by GPT-3). These impressions caused annoyance.
[At this point, I might be overthinking it; forgot how I actually felt.]
I didn’t downvote, but the analysis seems incorrect to me: most pro athletes are highly intelligent, and in terms of single attributes that predict success in subsequent difficult endeavors I can’t think of much better; I’d probably take it over successful startup CEO even. It also seems like the sort of error that’s particularly costly to make for reasons of overall social dynamics and biases.
Good point. I think I’d rather clarify/revise my claims to: 1) pro athletes will be somewhat less interested in EA than poker players, mostly due to different thinking styles, and 2) many/most pro athletes are highly generally capable but their comparative advantage won’t usually be donating tournament winnings or doing research. Something like promoting disarmament, or entering politics could be. But it needs way more thought.
Thanks! 1 seems believable to me, at least for EA as it currently presents. 2 seems believable on average but I’d expect a lot of heterogeneity (I personally know athletes who have gone on to be very good researchers). It also seems like donations are pretty accessible to everyone, as you can piggyback on other people’s research.
Just saw this now and strong-upvoted it; as one of the REG cofounders, I agree with your first point. (I actually kind of disagree with your second point – the poker industry often plays up how rich poker pros actually are, and the poker pros play along, but in reality many aren’t that wealthy as it seems.)
Despite this, I feel excited about HIA!
I also didn’t downvote but the first bullet point comes across really badly, and that’s speaking as someone who’s had considerably more success in poker than sport. My guess is that the downvotes are because of that.
Is the offensive part that intelligence might be useful, or that poker players might be more intelligent?
Like Mischa, I think it’s easily read as cringy and self congratulatory i.e.
“thanks for trying but I’m not sure you’re smart enough to join our cause.”
If I’d wanted to make that point, I’d probably have gone for something like:
> (probably as the third point) “however, I think that outreach to sportspeople might be much harder than to poker pros. Some EA ideas are quite counterintuitive, and there’s a lot of very similar reasoning in poker/EA, while in general I wouldn’t expect pro sports people to be as familiar with things like expected value reasoning”.
Seperately to why this was downvoted, I think your second bullet point is wrong. I expect that the top few earners in sport are at least an order of magnitude better off than in poker, and the set {pro sportspeople} earns at least three orders of magnitude more in total than {poker pros}.
Yes, the very richest sportspeople have ~$1B to poker players’ ~$0.1B. But the top sportspeople are rarer in their talents because ~100x more people try to play e.g. soccer than poker. Pro sport seems to pays less well than poker for any given level of talent. In order to equal the donations of poker players, you might have to get players who are quite elite and famous, or assemble a group across different sports. Whereas for poker it’s a tight-knit group of unknown nerds—easier to do!
I’m not sure why you’re dividing by the number of people who try to play sport? If you include in your definition of “poker pro” everyone who plays poker, on average they are losing money.
I’d be prepared to bet that, counting “earner” as “someone with positive lifetime earnings”, the nth highest earner in sport is making more than the nth highest earner in poker for all n.
What you divide by just depends what question you’re trying to answer.
I don’t think we really want to know about the total earnings, or the earnings of a player with a particular ranking, as these would assume that you can capture some large fraction, or some top-tier part of the total market. On those measures, “all people” is the best pool to recruit from.
More interesting questions [if you’re trying to raise donations] are things like “what are the average earnings?” or “how well-paid is an individual with a certain level of extraordinariness?”. If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player, then the soccer players are more sparse, more famous, and harder to recruit than equivalently rich poker players.
“If you need to be a one-in-a-million soccer player to earn as much as a one-in-a-thousand poker player”
But you don’t, unless you define “poker player” as “winning poker player” and “soccer player” as “anyone who’s kicked a football”.
As a data point, I downvoted the original comment but removed the downvote after reading the edited version, which I think is phrased a lot better.
In cases where a comment is edited after other comments critique it, I wonder if we should gently encourage a norm of having the removed words be crossed out, rather than deleted entirely? It is of course an author’s right to remove anything they no longer endorse, but it can be confusing to see comments refer to material that no longer exists.