In­ter­est­ing idea! We haven’t built that in yet, but I think we could build a fea­ture that would add up your dona­tions through­out the year and track your pro­jected im­pact, but wait un­til Giv­ing Tues­day to ac­tu­ally dis­burse the funds (in a way that would en­able the match).

Con­text: the re­port is 190 pages long and was pub­lished this month. Those who are read­ing it seem un­likely to re­ply with de­tailed anal­y­sis on this par­tic­u­lar Fo­rum post.

Ob­ject-level re­sponse: be­com­ing ex­cel­lent at chess, go, and shogi is in­ter­est­ing, since it is more gen­eral than be­ing ex­cel­lent at any one alone. My im­pres­sion is that the AI safety com­mu­nity recog­nises the im­por­tance of mile­stones like this. It is sim­ply the case that su­per­in­tel­li­gence typ­i­cally means some­thing far more gen­eral still, such as

an in­tel­lect that is much smarter than the best hu­man brains in prac­ti­cally ev­ery field, in­clud­ing sci­en­tific cre­ativity, gen­eral wis­dom and so­cial skills

which will not in­clude an AI which can play a spe­cific set of games.

Since we have now dis­cov­ered that the dis­agree­ment is merely a mat­ter of defi­ni­tions, hos­tilities can be ceased :)

By that logic you are turn­ing the idea of an x-risk into any­thing that re­ally mat­ters in the long run. So poverty is an x-risk too in this defi­ni­tion. That makes it not a use­ful defi­ni­tion and is also very differ­ent from how most peo­ple think about the term.

Ex­tinc­tion (or some­thing just as bad): x-risk. I go by that.

If ‘Co­or­di­na­tion for EA re­searchers’ is con­sid­ered by enough peo­ple to be a worth­while pro­ject to un­der­take, I’d be in­ter­ested in work­ing on that (in a pro­ject de­sign ca­pac­ity).

And on a re­lated note, I think com­bin­ing this pro­ject with oth­ers like the ‘EA ex­per­tise board’ or ‘Build a plat­form to match pro­jects with peo­ple who can do them’ would en­able the plat­form to reach a crit­i­cal mass of ac­tive users, mak­ing it re­ally worth­while for the com­mu­nity.

Can it help en­able Giv­ing Tues­day match­ing de­spite many small dona­tions through­out the year?

Thanks! Great ques­tion. Yes, it’s pri­mar­ily de­signed to help peo­ple who aren’t as fa­mil­iar with effec­tive giv­ing make more mean­ingful dona­tions. But even for peo­ple already en­gaged, it’ll help or­ga­nize your char­i­ties in one place, au­to­mate all of your dona­tions, and track the im­pact of ev­ery dol­lar.

https://​​www.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​im­pact/​​

Good day all,

Can any­one please provide an ex­am­ple of a tan­gible out­put from this ‘re­search or­ga­ni­za­tion’ of the sort EA gen­er­ally rec­og­nize and en­courage?

Any ra­tio­nale or con­sid­er­a­tion as to how as­so­ci­a­tion with such opaque groups does any­thing other than se­ri­ously un­der­mine EA’s mis­sion state­ment would also be ap­pre­ci­ated.

Kind Regards

Alis­tair Simmonds

You might en­joy this post Claire wrote: Eth­i­cal Offset­ting is An­ti­thet­i­cal to EA.

https://​​www.givewell.org/​​char­ity-eval­u­a­tion-questions

I ac­tu­ally wrote up a sur­vey a bit ago pul­ling to­gether nega­tive ex­ter­nal­ities with es­ti­mates in the liter­a­ture: https://​www.col-ex.org/​posts/​pi­gou­vian-com­pendium/​. From (es­ti­mated) largest to small­est, they are:

• Driving

• Emit­ting carbon

• Obesity

• Drink­ing alcohol

• Agriculture

• Mu­ni­ci­pal waste

• Smoking

• An­tibiotic use

• Debt

• Gun ownership

Rafa_fan­boy, I’ve writ­ten to you but I’m not sure if you saw the mes­sage. You con­sis­tently make com­ments that aren’t helpful, and peo­ple reg­u­larly re­port them. Please try to keep your com­ments in the realm of “friendly and pro­duc­tive.”

Hey Holly! Since I read this post I found an ac­countabil­ity part­ner a bit later. The sys­tem works well and we’ve built it out ac­cord­ing to our own needs, but I like that you’ve kept it sim­ple. A lot of sys­tems and life­hacks are very spe­cific which makes them a pain to im­ple­ment.

So thank you and good job! :)

IF I’d make an ad­di­tion to your ad­vice, it would prob­a­bly be: plan a brief eval­u­a­tion af­ter x (3? 6?) months to take a big­ger pic­ture:

• Has the sys­tem ac­tu­ally helped you ac­com­plish things, rather than just be­ing pro­duc­tive?

• How do you like the role of each other? Would you like them to be more strict? Would you like them to fo­cus on spe­cific ques­tions or pit­falls? (E.g. I asked my buddy to guard my from tak­ing on too many re­spon­si­bil­ities—when I plan a new pro­ject she asks me “ok, so what are you go­ing to drop to make place for it?“)

This sounds promis­ing!

one ques­tion—as i un­der­stand it’s not de­signed to help EA’s who already donate in cash, but mostly for peo­ple who aren’t fa­mil­iar with effec­tive giv­ing, and won’t have enough mo­ti­va­tion to get into it—right?

you dont need to speci­fi­cally offset that, just donate to the best char­ity. you already have a net pos­i­tive im­pact by be­ing ea anyway

I see, yes good point.

It ap­pears un­for­tu­nate that no­body can be both­ered to read the un­der­ly­ing pa­per, writ­ten by Eric Drexler, a se­nior Oxford Martin fel­low which com­pletely re­frames the AI de­bate, to some­thing far from pa­per clips and much closer to re­al­ity. If a hu­man sat down at Chess, Go, and Shogi and sim­ply by play­ing the game be­came far bet­ter than any other hu­man in a cou­ple of weeks we would all see this as su­per­in­tel­li­gent. That this achieve­ment is so eas­ily dis­missed to me shows an a com­plete un­will­ing­ness to deal with re­al­ity as it is.

I gen­er­ally agree. The ques­tion is whether we should call some­thing an X-risk by the im­pact if it hap­pens alone or by the im­pact*prob­a­bil­ity. If the lat­ter, and if comets are an X-risk, then we should call ex­treme cli­mate change (and definitely nu­clear war) an X-risk.

Thanks very much! And the work­place ac­tivism hand­book looks in­ter­est­ing even though it’s not di­rectly re­lated to this par­tic­u­lar pro­ject, so thanks for that too.

In­ter­est­ing ques­tion! I think Givewell’s es­ti­mate for how much money they’ve di­rected over the years should be counted in some way as well.