Thanks for the kind com­ment.

My guess is that the US would be the best place to start (a thick “mar­ket”, poor out­comes), but I’m talk­ing about prison sys­tems in gen­eral.

I’m not fa­mil­iar with the UK sys­tem, but I haven’t heard of any prison sys­tem with a solid the­o­ret­i­cal ground­ing. The­ory is re­quired be­cause we want to com­pare a pro­posed sys­tem to all other pos­si­ble sys­tems and con­clude that our pro­posal is the best. You want the­o­ret­i­cal rea­sons to be­lieve that your sys­tem will perform well, and that good perfor­mance will en­dure.

Most sys­tems can work well in the short run, but that doesn’t mean they’re good. For ex­am­ple, if I were ruled by a good king, I still wouldn’t want to have a monar­chy in place. If the UK sys­tem cur­rently works well, I sus­pect that you have good reg­u­la­tors who are man­u­ally han­dling the short­com­ings of the un­der­ly­ing sys­tem.

It seems fairly un­con­tro­ver­sial to me that some­one who does a highly im­pact­ful, morally mo­ti­vated thing, but hasn’t even heard of the EA com­mu­nity, doesn’t count as part of the EA com­mu­nity (in the sense dis­cussed here).

I agree, but if they are a GWWC mem­ber, then they would have heard of EA, and more im­por­tantly, likely have been in­fluenced by EA. What I’m in­ter­ested in is how many peo­ple have been in­fluenced by EA to do EA-like things – I guess this is David Nash’s “EA net­work?” Do we agree this >10,000 peo­ple?

I’m the founder of Anti­grav­ity In­vest­ments, an EA so­cial en­ter­prise and SEC-reg­istered in­vest­ment ad­vi­sor with the mis­sion of donat­ing mil­lions of dol­lars to high-im­pact causes by in­creas­ing re­turns on char­i­ta­ble cap­i­tal held by donors, non­prof­its, foun­da­tions, etc. We’ve ad­vised over $20 mil­lion in char­i­ta­ble cap­i­tal and been sup­ported by CEA’s EA Grants pro­gram, the Berkeley SkyDeck ac­cel­er­a­tor, Amer­i­can Ex­press, and Ashoka.

If any­one would like im­ple­men­ta­tion as­sis­tance, I think we’re a good al­ter­na­tive to Alpha Ar­chi­tect—we also op­er­ate in the ev­i­dence-based in­vest­ing space, and we provide free ad­vis­ing to EAs along with lower-cost in­vest­ment man­age­ment. We’re an ad­vi­sor on the In­ter­ac­tive Bro­kers plat­form and also sup­port other bro­ker­age firms like Van­guard.

I like the breadth of con­tent cov­ered in this post. Re­gard­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion de­tails, if a small donor is go­ing to fund things that are differ­ent than what other EAs would typ­i­cally fund—an ap­proach that var­i­ous EAs have ad­vo­cated for and one that I per­son­ally sup­port—then I think there’s a strong ar­gu­ment to not “in­vest all your al­tru­is­tic funds into a man­aged fu­tures fund.” Separately, I think there’s a high like­li­hood that this ap­proach (i.e. 100% in QMHIX or EQCHX) will un­der­perform a bal­anced port­fo­lio, GAA, and a lot of other ap­proaches over a short-term, medium-term, and long-term timeframe.

If some­one is tak­ing the ap­proach of di­ver­sify­ing into other as­sets that most of the money in EA is not in­vested in, I’m more en­thu­si­as­tic about spec­u­lat­ing in as­set classes that have his­tor­i­cally ex­pe­rienced good re­turns (ven­ture cap­i­tal or even gold), or per­haps more promis­ing, in­vest­ing in a mar­ket that isn’t that effi­cient or that the in­vestor be­lieves they might have an edge in (cryp­tocur­ren­cies, pre­dic­tion mar­kets, an­gel in­vest­ing, etc).

I be­lieve that Good Ven­tures’ in­vest­ment data may be available on their Form 990. I am writ­ing an up­com­ing ar­ti­cle on how EAs can use Form 990 data to in­crease fund­ing for char­i­ta­ble causes, po­ten­tially by mil­lions of dol­lars with only a few hours of effort. I will try to up­date this com­ment when my ar­ti­cle is out.

That’s re­ally in­ter­est­ing—do you have any recom­mended read­ing on the UK sys­tem?

I mostly just fore­casted the covid-19 ques­tions on Me­tac­u­lus di­rectly. I do think pre­dict­ing covid early on (be­fore May?) was a near-ideal epistemic en­vi­ron­ment for this, be­cause of var­i­ous fac­tors like

a) important

b) in a weird so­cial epistemic state where lots of dis­parate, in­di­vi­d­u­ally easy to un­der­stand, true in­for­ma­tion is out there

c) where lots of false in­for­ma­tion is out there

d) have very fast feed­back loops and

e) pre­dict­ing things/​truth-seek­ing is shock­ing un­com­pet­i­tive.

The feed­back cy­cle (maybe sev­eral times a week for some in­di­vi­d­ual ques­tions) are still slower than what the de­liber­ate prac­tice re­search was fo­cused on (spe­cific tech­niques in arts and sports with sub-minute feed­back). But it’s much much bet­ter than other plau­si­bly im­por­tant things.

I prob­a­bly also benefited from prac­tice through the South Bay EA mee­tups[1] and the Open Phil cal­ibra­tion game.

[1] If go­ing through all the work­sheets is in­timi­dat­ing, I recom­mend just try­ing this one (start with “In­tro to fore­cast­ing” and then do the “In­tro to fore­cast­ing work­sheet”

[2] https://​​www.open­philan­thropy.org/​​blog/​​new-web-app-cal­ibra­tion-training

Thanks for mak­ing this post! I think it would be helpful if you linked di­rectly to the playlist for EAGxVir­tual 2020 in­stead of the chan­nel.

Nice ad­di­tion and caveats, thanks! :)

Thanks for the tip- have now ed­ited!

Yep—the au­thor can click on the image and then drag from the cor­ner to en­large them (found this difficult to find my­self)

For any­one who might doubt that clock speed should have a mul­ti­ply­ing effect (as­sum­ing lin­ear/​ad­di­tive ag­gre­ga­tion), if it didn’t, then I think how good it would be to help an­other hu­man be­ing would de­pend on how fast they are mov­ing rel­a­tive to you, and whether they are in an area of greater or lower grav­i­ta­tional “force” than you, due to spe­cial and gen­eral rel­a­tivity. That is, if they are in rel­a­tive mo­tion or un­der stronger grav­i­ta­tional effects, time passes more slowly for them from your point of view, i.e. their clock speed is lower, but they also live longer. Rel­a­tive mo­tion goes both ways: time passes more slowly for you from their point of view. If you don’t ad­just for clock speed by mul­ti­ply­ing, there are two hy­po­thet­i­cal iden­ti­cal hu­mans in differ­ent frames of refer­ence (rel­a­tive mo­tion or grav­i­ta­tional po­ten­tial or ac­cel­er­a­tion; one frame of refer­ence can be your own) with iden­ti­cal ex­pe­riences and lives from their own points of view that should re­ceive differ­ent moral weights from your point of view. That seems pretty ab­surd to me.

Thanks for do­ing this, I think it’s a great talk.

The images ended up a bit too small, I think. Is it pos­si­ble to make them larger some­how? I think that would be great. Thanks.

If an ob­jec­tive list the­ory is true, couldn’t it be the case that there are kinds of goods un­available to us that are available to some other non­hu­man an­i­mals? Or that they are available to us, but most of us don’t ap­pre­ci­ate them so they aren’t rec­og­nized as goods? How could we find out? Are ob­jec­tive list the­o­ries there­fore doomed to an­thro­pocen­trism and speciesism? How do ob­jec­tive list the­o­ries ar­gue that some­thing is or isn’t one of these goods?

Thanks for the an­swer. Makes sense!

I’m also still pretty con­fused about why the S&P 500 is so high now.

Some pos­si­ble in­sight: the NASDAQ is do­ing even bet­ter, at its all-time high and wasn’t hit as hard ini­tially, and the equal-weight S&P 500 is do­ing worse than the reg­u­lar S&P 500 (which weights based on mar­ket cap), so this tells me that dis­pro­por­tionately large com­pa­nies (and tech com­pa­nies) are still grow­ing pretty fast. Some of these com­pa­nies may even have benefit­ted in some ways, like Ama­zon (on­line shop­ping and stream­ing) and Net­flix (stream­ing).

20% of the S&P 500 is Microsoft, Ap­ple, Ama­zon, Face­book and Google. Only Google is still down since Fe­bru­ary at their peaks be­fore the crash, the rest are up 5-15%, other than Ama­zon (4% of the S&P 500), which is up 40%!

I wrote a fol­low-up to this post on my web­site, Do The­o­ret­i­cal Models Ac­cu­rately Pre­dict Op­ti­mal Lev­er­age? I haven’t posted it to the EA Fo­rum be­cause it’s not di­rectly rele­vant to EA.

A third cat­e­gory of things that are dis­tinct from the clas­sic Streisand effect, but similar enough that it is of­ten worth dis­cussing them to­gether, is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive se­crecy. That is, cases where, in­stead of caus­ing in­for­ma­tion spread by at­tempt­ing to change the ac­tions of oth­ers, you cause it by be­ing os­ten­ta­tiously se­cre­tive your­self.

One thing that would be very use­ful to me is a good name for this effect, as dis­tinct from the Streisand effect. Like I said in the piece, they’re clearly re­lated, but I think dis­tinct enough to merit sep­a­rate terms, and hav­ing a good name would help clar­ify the con­cep­tual space.

Any­one know any good cases of se­crecy (as op­posed to cen­sor­ship) spec­tac­u­larly back­firing?

This is a great post, thanks for writ­ing this up!

I agree with the main point, and 80,000 Hours’ web­page does make it clear that their top ca­reer recom­men­da­tions (and the spe­cific jobs in these ar­eas that are highly con­cen­trated in a few or­ga­ni­za­tions) are pretty com­pet­i­tive, and most peo­ple on the EA move­ment are not go­ing to be able to get into one of those. When plan­ning my ca­reer, I fac­tor in this pos­si­bil­ity, but one prob­lem I face is that I don’t feel I know enough about these other pos­si­bil­ities, and so there is a lot of un­cer­tainty when I think about what should I do out­side of the top ca­reer paths and top or­ga­ni­za­tions.

I don’t think the solu­tion to this prob­lem is for 80,000 Hours to try to dis­cuss other prob­lem ar­eas and men­tion other EA-al­igned or­ga­ni­za­tions in more de­tail, be­cause that would take a lot of effort. One thing that could be helpful, though, is to em­pha­size more the pro­cess peo­ple should go through when plan­ning their ca­reers, with more guidance on how to tackle prob­lem ar­eas that haven’t been ex­plored in much de­tail, how to ex­plore ar­eas that an EA think might be rele­vant but hasn’t been ex­plored at all, how to find or­ga­ni­za­tions to work for in the prob­lem ar­eas they are in­ter­ested in, and what to do if you can’t get a job at an or­ga­ni­za­tion you re­ally want to work for in the long term.

I be­lieve it would also help to share the tra­jec­to­ries of peo­ple in the EA com­mu­nity who have done some in­no­va­tive work, or peo­ple who man­aged to find jobs at EA-al­igned or­ga­ni­za­tions that the move­ment was pre­vi­ously un­aware of, em­pha­siz­ing how they ap­proached the task. Fa­cil­i­tat­ing net­work­ing be­tween peo­ple in a cer­tain prob­lem area could also prove re­ally helpful.

I’m not say­ing there isn’t any con­tent in these top­ics, just that in my ex­pe­rience writ­ing up and im­prov­ing my own ca­reer plan over a few years I found it much eas­ier to find EA ma­te­rial on why should I take a cer­tain ca­reer path than on how to do it more con­cretely (be­sides work­ing at top ca­reer paths and or­ga­ni­za­tions), and that based on my ex­pe­rience I be­lieve em­pha­siz­ing more these as­pects could go a long way into helping peo­ple struc­ture bet­ter ca­reer plans.

A good post with in­ter­est­ing ideas.

I think it is how­ever worth flag­ging to the read­ers that this is a pre­sum­ably a US cen­tric post. My un­der­stand­ing is that in the UK at least our pri­vate pris­ons sys­tem performs well (and out-performs the pub­lic pris­ons).

I ex­pect a lot could be learned by look­ing at coun­tries that do pri­vate pris­ons well.

Thanks Michael, I had seen that but hadn’t looked at the links. Some com­ments:

The cause re­port from OPP makes the dis­tinc­tion be­tween molec­u­lar nan­otech­nol­ogy and atom­i­cally pre­cise man­u­fac­tur­ing. The 2008 sur­vey seemed to be ex­plic­itly con­sid­er­ing weapon­ised molec­u­lar nan­otech­nol­ogy as an ex­tinc­tion risk (I as­sume the nan­otech­nol­ogy ac­ci­dent was refer­ring to molec­u­lar nan­otech­nol­ogy as well). While there seems to be agree­ment that molec­u­lar nan­otech­nol­ogy could be a di­rect path to GCR/​ex­tinc­tion, OPP pre­sents atom­i­cally pre­cise man­u­fac­tur­ing as be­ing more of an in­di­rect risk, such as through fa­cil­i­tat­ing weapons pro­lifer­a­tion. The Grey goo sec­tion of the re­port does re­solve my ques­tion about why the com­mu­nity isn’t talk­ing about (molec­u­lar) nan­otech­nol­ogy as an ex­is­ten­tial risk as much now (the foot­notes are worth read­ing for more de­tails):

‘Grey goo’ is a pro­posed sce­nario in which tiny self-repli­cat­ing ma­chines out­com­pete or­ganic life and rapidly con­sume the earth’s re­sources in or­der to make more copies of them­selves.40 Ac­cord­ing to Dr. Drexler, a grey goo sce­nario could not hap­pen by ac­ci­dent; it would re­quire de­liber­ate de­sign.41 Both Drexler and Phoenix have ar­gued that such run­away repli­ca­tors are, in prin­ci­ple, a phys­i­cal pos­si­bil­ity, and Phoenix has even ar­gued that it’s likely that some­one will even­tu­ally try to make grey goo. How­ever, they be­lieve that other risks from APM are (i) more likely, and (ii) very likely to be rele­vant be­fore risks from grey goo, and are there­fore more wor­thy of at­ten­tion.42 Similarly, Prof. Jones and Dr. Mar­ble­stone have ar­gued that a ‘grey goo’ catas­tro­phe is a dis­tant, and per­haps un­likely, pos­si­bil­ity.43

OPP’s dis­cus­sion on why molec­u­lar nan­otech­nol­ogy (and cry­on­ics) failed to de­velop as sci­en­tific fields is also in­ter­est­ing:

First, early ad­vo­cates of cry­on­ics and MNT fo­cused on writ­ings and me­dia aimed at a broad pop­u­lar au­di­ence, be­fore they did much tech­ni­cal, sci­en­tific work …

Se­cond, early ad­vo­cates of cry­on­ics and MNT spoke and wrote in a way that was crit­i­cal and dis­mis­sive to­ward the most rele­vant main­stream sci­en­tific fields …

Third, and per­haps largely as a re­sult of these first two is­sues, these “neigh­bor­ing” es­tab­lished sci­en­tific com­mu­ni­ties (of cry­obiol­o­gists and chemists) en­gaged in sub­stan­tial “bound­ary work” to keep ad­vo­cates of cry­on­ics and MNT ex­cluded …

It least in the case of molec­u­lar nan­otech­nol­ogy, the sim­ple failure of the field to de­velop may have been lucky (at least from a GCR re­duc­tion per­spec­tive) as it seems that the re­search that was (at the time) most likely to lead to the risky out­comes was sim­ply never pur­sued.

Thanks!

At the time when I wrote this post, the for­mat­ting ei­ther didn’t yet al­low the hy­per­linked end­notes, or (more likely) I didn’t know how to do the mark­down. I plan to up­date the end­notes here so they be­come more eas­ily read­able.

Thanks for post­ing this! I just joined the group. I’ve been on Fo­cus­mate for a cou­ple of months and spot­ted the “EA Move­ment” badge on a few peo­ple’s pro­files, but the cou­ple of peo­ple whom I asked didn’t know how I could join.

I definitely sec­ond the pro­duc­tivity boost, es­pe­cially for peo­ple who have found them­selves work­ing at home for the first time.