The situation is this: Customer incurs a debt and does not pay. Creditor hires Bill Collector to dun Customer for the money. Bill Collector puts a machine on the job and repeatedly calls Cell Number, at which Customer had agreed to receive phone calls by giving his number to Creditor. The machine, called a predictive dialer, works autonomously until a human voice comes on the line. If that happens, an employee in Bill Collector’s call center will join the call. But Customer no longer subscribes to Cell Number, which has been reassigned to Bystander. A human being who called Cell Number would realize that Customer was no longer the subscriber. But predictive dialers lack human intelligence and, like the buckets enchanted by the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, continue until stopped by their true master.
How would a therapist diagnose an EA mindset?
I wonder why I’m drawn to EA — particularly in terms of my personality. For example, I have a tendency to justify things (sometimes myself) and endorsing EA principles might simply be an extension of this. EA principles allow me to justify my choice of career, lifestyle, values, diet, etc.
Does anyone else see EA as an extension of their deep desire to justify things? Since justification is a defensive process, I wonder whether this has any relation to self-esteem or self-worth.
And, if EA doesn’t relate to a desire to justify things, is it simply another form of social signalling? Except we’re signalling to philosophers and computer scientists, who have unusual values (thus the unusual signals).
How would a therapist diagnose the EA mindset? That’s to say: if I began therapy tomorrow, and told my therapist, ‘I feel obliged to donate 10% of my income to charity. I feel obliged to work for an organisation trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems. I feel obliged to do both of these because I think that they could minimise the needless suffering of others more than any other course of action I can think of’. What conclusions would they draw about my personality?
You might find it helpful to look at this ethnography of an EA group. Also relevant is this analysis of the Big Five personality traits of respondents to the Rethink Charity community survey. It has statistical flaws, but one takeaway is that most EAs are high in openness. Finally, there’s this Global Optimum Podcast episode on the personality of EAs.
Justification and signalling explanations don’t seem especially compelling to me because in some sense, everything is justification and signaling. Also, I’m not sure if you’re hinting at this, but it’s unlikely that you’ll be diagnosed with a mental illness just for being drawn to / believing in EA, unless it significantly impedes your everyday functioning. Since I’m not a therapist, I don’t think I can comment further on what a therapist would say.
Add to (3) new explanations or additions to methodologies—e.g., I still haven’t found anything substantial about the idea of adding something like ‘urgence’ to the ITN framework.
Reading science fiction to build intuition about longtermism:
Throughout my involvement over the past 2 years leading and participating in EA fellowships, I’ve heard numerous fellows say something like “longtermism seems interesting and somewhat convincing, but I find it hard to think about and at times intractable”. This difficulty in thinking about how our current actions can have massive long-term impacts on timelines longer than say, a century, isn’t something most people coming into an intro to EA fellowship have thought about.
From my experience these students then, on average, are more likely to work on other EA cause areas like animal welfare/global poverty/etc.
I have never had difficulty thinking about longtermism. I suspect this is partly because I read a large amount of science fiction. In books like Foundation, The Three-Body Problem, and The Mote in God’s Eye, the stories unfold over hundreds or thousands of years, and the actions of characters at the beginning of the books dramatically affect entire civilizations generations later.
I encourage others in the EA community to think about whether there is a correlation between people who find longtermism not just academically persuasive but intuitive and people with exposure to this kind of science fiction. It may be useful for us to encourage others in the community to consume this type of science fiction to motivate the pursuit of working on long-term causes (though of course we don’t want people to then think of longtermism as “science fiction” in the worst sense of the word).
This is an interesting idea; thanks for writing it up!
I consider myself a “longtermist” and have read a lot of science fiction, but most examples I’ve seen in sci-fi of people affecting the future don’t feel convincing to me. To comment on some of your examples:
“Psychohistory” (Foundation) is fine as “the premise you have to accept to read the book”, but is very silly as an actual concept.
The Dark Forest trilogy (Three-Body Problem, etc.) has a few sections where we skip ahead into the future and see how things have developed, but the explanations for that development typically take up roughly a page and use a style of historical narrative that doesn’t really match what longtermist work feels like (rather than a few people or groups achieving influence, IIRC the explanation tends to be “humans became more like X, ergo thing Y happened”).
I feel like I’ve read a couple of books that really capture the process of changing the world over centuries, and the kinds of work that go into those changes, but no titles are coming to mind.
What I’ve found more helpful: Books that capture what it’s like to be at the mercy of some overwhelming, civilization-shattering force. These include On the Beach and Alas, Babylon (nuclear war) and books with realistically superintelligent or super-advanced aliens (the Dark Forest trilogy does pretty well here). I think people often struggle to understand how it would feel to contend with something fundamentally smarter than humans, and sci-fi gets that scary feeling across quite well.
Semi-aside: Have you read Canticle for Leibowitz? I barely remember exact details from the book, but I read it when I was very young, and plausibly it affected my priors on nuclear war somewhat, in a subtle/sneaky way.
You nailed it—Aasimov’s and Cixin Liu’s classics should be almost compulsory reading. However, it caught my eye you call Cixin Liu’s trilogy the Dark Forest Trilogy, instead of referring to it as something likeThe 3-body problem books or Trisolarian Trilogy or Remembrances of Earth’s Past. What I enjoy most in these books is the challenge of maintaining something like long-term cooperation. To such a list I’d add something like The Ministry for the Future (someone should add a good review to this forum); but though it has wonderful passages, sometimes it’s irrealistic optimistic (or even simplistic, along the lines “capitalism is evil”) and takes a lot for granted.
‘Good’ news: as expected, as real interest rates fall, so do SDR, increasing the social cost of carbon. (not novelty, ok, but monetary policy-makers explicitly acknowledging it seems to be good) Bad news: of course, it still seems to be higher than a normative SDR based on time-neutrality.
[HALF-BAKED IDEA—Fundraising through paid newsletters / text message courses.]
THE IDEA : Paid newsletters and paid text message courses should be considered as a potential earn -to-give entrepreneurship strategy.
More specifically, newsletters / text messages that are focused on sourcing items of interest for niche groups e.g. jobs, events, petitions, ideas, tools, content etc.
Some quick thoughts on why:
(WARNING: I am by no stretch of the imagination a fundraising expert, also this might be the longest short form ever)
Generally speaking, I don’t believe crowdfunding donations from the public is that effective, mainly due to a lack of social norms (most people don’t make time in their schedules to donate and even when they do, they are unlikely to share a charity they like with friends in the way they would share a product they like.)
For EA charities, I estimate this holds particularly true.
I believe the best way to fundraise from the general public is to sell a product they want (maybe with a bit of mark up) while being clear that you are trying to raise money for an altruistic cause.
I would suggest the ideal product would:
Maximise potential profit
Maximise ‘social influence gains’
Minimise potential losses
Minimise threat of competition
Limit potential harm
Broadly, digital products seem like the best way to do this.
Here are some rough thoughts on why I think item sourcing newsletters / text message idea seems like it would be a particularly good fit.
Crowdsourcing – This is possibly the most important reason. I would say the more crowdsourcing can be used in the creation and delivery of a service the more advantage a not-for-profit organisation is going to have as a provider over for-profits. The reason being, the more you can utilise crowdsourcing the more you can utilise volunteers and individuals are, presumably, more likely to volunteer for a not-for-profit than a for-profit.
Remote – Not all EAs are based around economic centres, limiting their access to many of the common EA career options. I believe a remote team could deliver a newsletter service.
Mass appeal – I would say that it is generally easier to make a big profit by getting a little bit of money out of a lot of customers than by getting a lot of money out of a few customers (even with current levels of wealth inequality).
Social Influence – If successful, the newsletters would amass a big audience which is an asset in itself.
Supply and demand—A general rule in economics is that the greater the supply of a product/service the cheaper it becomes. However, with digital products it seems this only hold up to a point. The supply of a digital product is practically unlimited, so, with a big enough customer base one might be able to make a profit while charging tiny amounts. But most consumers probably aren’t going to sweat getting their credit card out for a $1 transaction over a 10cents transaction. This could be mean that one could theoretically attain big profit margins. Moreover, the supply of a digital product is naturally matched to the demand, different newsletters will have different demands (depending on how niche they are) leading to different prices. So there will be no standard price for a newsletter in the same way there is for an apple. This ambiguity in pricing would make it easier to add a mark up as consumers would have no clear expectation for the price of a newsletter.
Simple but not too simple – The more complex the service / product the less likely one is to be able to create a competitive product. The simpler the service / product the more people will try to offer it. Newsletters seem to strike a nice balance.
Valuable but not too valuable – Finds a balance between being valuable enough to pay for, but no so valuable that consumers will spend a lot of time making sure they get the absolute best one – so one does not need to create the absolute best product on the market to succeed.
Minimal investment required – Small amount of time and money required to create MVP = minimal potential losses.
Plenty of room – Unlike with a lot of things, like insurance, there’s no clear limit on how many newsletters a person needs. So there should be plenty of room in the market. Moreover, there are countless ways that one can create a newsletter and plenty of niches to find.
Of course, we would need a name for an organisation that provides such a service, how about….
SOURCY MEDIA [Pronounced: ‘Saucy’].
Here are some ideas on what items could be sourced....
Three cheers for long Shortform posts! Totally fine to spell out a half-baked idea here, at whatever length.
Anyway, one of the first questions I always want to ask when I hear a business idea: What’s an example of this type of business succeeding?
Clearly, there are successful people writing newsletters on Substack. But did any of them:
a) Start with a fairly small audience, many/most of whom were already giving them money without expecting something in return?
b) Try to crowdsource content from many sources, instead of having a single author be the driving force/personality behind the newsletter?
There may be newsletters in this category, but I expect that they are quite rare.
Additionally, most EA orgs actively want their ideas to be free, because they want as many people as possible to hear them, and this is more valuable to them than whatever money they would get from a much smaller paid audience. For example, even if 80K could convert their 100,000+ newsletter subscribers into an audience of 10,000 people paying $5/month (no small task), I don’t know if they would want to, given how many fewer people would get job leads from them under that scenario.
As far as newsletters created by individual entrepreneurs, this is a reasonable business idea like many others. You can find lots of online guides to building an audience for your copywriting, coaches to help you get started, clubs where people share feedback on each other’s writing, and so on. But like most reasonable businesses, this one is fairly competitive and tough to succeed in (no such thing as a free lunch!). It will be a reasonable thing to do for a few EAs, maybe, but doesn’t stand out to me as more promising than other types of startups.
This doesn’t make it a bad idea—just one of many, many things that people should consider if they want to build a business.
With regards to EA orgs e.g. 80,000 hours. I wasn’t trying to suggest that EA orgs have their own paid newsletters. Rather, I was suggesting that a separate not-for-profit organisation could be set up specifically for creating paid newsletters (on any topic) while stating that said organisation is trying to raise money for effective charities. The organisation would be made of individuals and teams who each run different paid newsletters under one umbrella. (These potentially could be subsidiary companies; I haven’t really thought through all the business legal stuff).
Sorry, I should have been clearer on this.
The everything newsletter is a combination of newsletters which illustrates how an umbrella organisation with multiple newsletters could work.
With regards to finding examples, I haven’t deep dived into this, but I do know that Product Hunt (bought by AngelList) started out basically as an e-mail list with a) a small audience and b) crowdsourcing their content. Its now morphed into something a bit different than a paid newsletter. Though it does have its Founders Club offering which isn’t that different. (I think newsletters tie in very well with community platforms like those which can be built with tools like circle).
Building an audience does seem like it would be the big hurdle. But I think this would give the EA community an advantage in this arena. If the EA community knows that there is an organisation trying to raise money for effective charities, then they could direct people in their social media networks towards the newsletters. This should provide a big enough ‘snowball’ to start with. Presumably, the combined network of everyone in the EA community is fairly large (though I don’t have figures on this—there is probably a lot of EAs in the followings of EA members and obviously it would be non-EAs that would be the target audience).
Donor Advised Funds with no minimum contribution requirements
Fidelity Charitable and Schwab Charitable recently eliminated the minimum initial contribution requirements for their donor-advised funds.
Fidelity and Schwab are major financial services companies. Their nonprofit arms operate donor-advised funds (DAFs), which are tools to make donating more convenient and tax-efficient (see Aaron Hamlin’s succinct summaryfor more info). Like many financial services companies, Fidelity and Schwab previously required customers to contribute ~$5,000 in order to open a DAF. Now, they’ll let you open a DAF with any initial contribution.
This is particularly exciting for donors interested in patient philanthropy: the idea that we could maximize the impact of our donations by donating later. To learn more about patient philanthropy and see if this approach might be right for you, see:
The Good Judgement Open forecasting tournament gives a 66% chance for the answer to “Will the UN declare that a famine exists in any part of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, or Uganda in 2020?”
I think that the 66% is a slight overestimate. But nonetheless, if a famine does hit, it would be terrible, as other countries might not be able to spare enough attention due to the current pandemic.
The Tigray region is now seeing armed conflict. I’m at 5-10%+ that it develops into famine (regardless of whether it ends up meeting the rather stringent UN conditions for the term to be used) (but have yet to actually look into the base rate). I’ve sent an email to FEWs.net to see if they update their forecasts.
I feel increasingly unsympathetic to hedonism (and maybe experientalism generally?). Yes, emotions matter, and the strength of emotions could be taken to mean how much something matters, but if you separate a cow and her calf and they’re distressed by this, the appropriate response for their sake is not to drug or fool them until they feel better, it’s to reunite them. What they want is each other, not to feel better. Sometimes I think about something bad in the world that makes me sad; I don’t think you do me any favour by just taking away my sadness; I don’t want to stop feeling sad, what I want is for the bad in the world to be addressed.
Rather than affect being what matters in itself, maybe affect is a signal for what matters and its intensity tells us how much it matters. Hedonism as normally understood would therefore be like Goodhart’s law: it ignores the objects of our emotions.
Of course, often we do just want to feel better, and that matters, too. If someone wants to not suffer, then of course they should not suffer.
Reasons why upvotes on the EA forum and LW don’t correlate that well with impact .
More easily accessible content, or more introductory material gets upvoted more.
Material which gets shared more widely gets upvoted more.
Content which is more prone to bikeshedding gets upvoted more.
Posts which are beautifully written are more upvoted.
Posts written by better known authors are more upvoted (once you’ve seen this, you can’t unsee).
The time at which a post is published affects how many upvotes it gets.
Other random factors, such as whether other strong posts are published at the same time, also affect the number of upvotes.
Not all projects are conducive to having a post written about them.
The function from value to upvotes is concave (e.g., like a logarithm or like a square root), in that a project which results in a post with a 100 upvotes is probably more than 5 times as valuable as 5 posts with 20 upvotes each. This is what you’d expect if the supply of upvotes was limited.
Upvotes suffer from inflation as EA forum gets populated more, so that a post which would have gathered 50 upvotes two years might gather 100 upvotes now.
Upvotes may not take into account the relationship between projects, or other indirect effects. For example, projects which contribute to existing agendas are probably more valuable than otherwise equal standalone projects, but this might not be obvious from the text.
I agree that the correlation between number of upvotes on EA forum and LW posts/comments and impact isn’t very strong. (My sense is that it’s somewhere between weak and strong, but not very weak or very strong.) I also agree that most of the reasons you list are relevant.
But how I’d frame this is that—for example—a post being more accessible increases the post’s expected upvotes even more than it increases its expected impact. I wouldn’t say “Posts that are more accessible get more upvotes, therefore the correlation is weak”, because I think increased accessibility will indeed increase a post’s impact (holding other factor’s constant).
Same goes for many of the other factors you list.
E.g., more sharing tends to both increase a post’s impact (more readers means more opportunity to positively influence people) and signal that the post would have a positive impact on each reader (as that is one factor—among many—in whether people share things). So the mere fact that sharing probably tends to increase upvotes to some extent doesn’t necessarily weaken the correlation between upvotes and impact. (Though I’d guess that sharing does increase upvotes more than it increases/signals impact, so this comment is more like a nitpick than a very substantive disagreement.)
To make it clear, the claim is that the number karma for a forum post on a project does not correlate well with the project’s direct impact? Rather than, say, that a karma score of a post correlates well with the impact of the post itself on the community?
I’d say it also doesn’t correlate that well with its total (direct+indirect) impact either, but yes. And I was thinking more in contrast to the karma score being an ideal measure of total impact; I don’t have thoughts to share here on the impact of the post itself on the community.
I think that for me, I upvote according to how much I think a post itself is valuable for me or for the community as a whole. At least, that’s what I’m trying to do when I’m thinking about it logically.
I intend to add to this list over time. If you know of other relevant work, please mention it in a comment. I also may create a tag for relevant posts.
oh, of course, for-profit charities are a thing! that makes sense
I learned about it in “Economics without Illusion”, chapter 8.
it’s not because your organization’s product/service/goal is to help other people and your customers are philanthropists that you can’t make a profit.
profitable charities might increase competition to provide more effective altruism, and so still provide more value even though it makes a profit (maybe)
That is, a pugnacious (but scrupulous) public advocate of EA and EA-adjacent ideas. In the EA community currently, who might come closest to being something like EA’s bulldog?
More precisely, I’m thinking of a hybrid between, say, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer (or perhaps Derek Parfit, for added dryness). A fiery, polemical wit married to a calm, analytical rigor.
A good, non-EA -affiliated example of this style is Alex J. O’Connor, better known as Cosmic Skeptic on YouTube, a student of philosophy at Oxford whose confrontational yet nuanced content on atheism and veganism is rather popular now (a good example is his speech on veganism and animal rights). On his podcast, he’s interviewed Peter Singer, and frequently cites Hitchens as an inspiration.
I suspect that many EAs would be skeptical and cautious of this approach, for various reasons. Certain versions of it would appear to cut against certain EA features commonly regarded as virtues: considerateness and cooperation (and their encouragement), epistemic modesty (e.g. focusing heavily on uncertainties), compassion in disagreement, respecting norms of agreeable conduct, etc.
Similarly, it seems to carry reputational risks, including a risk of doing accidental harm to EA’s public image. In this sense, it risks being a hard-to-reverse decision, resulting in more costs than benefits (William MacAskill discusses this here). Maybe this is reason enough for an advocate of this kind not to wish to be publicly associated with EA even while supporting and highlighting its cause-areas.
On the other hand, perhaps at least some of this style can attract and/or sustain more positive, public attention than milder outreach approaches, and perhaps even shape public opinion more effectively.
There’s much more to say, but this is already much longer than I intended. I’d love to read any thoughts on this, and/or to be pointed in the direction of previous, related discussion.
I feel like the main role of a bulldog is to fend off the fiery, polemical enemies of a movement. Atheism and veganism (and even AI safety, kind of) have clear opponents; I don’t think the same is especially true of EA (as a collection of causes).
There are people who argue for localism, or the impracticality of measuring impact, but I can’t think of the last time I’ve seen one of those people have a bad influence on EA. The meat industry wants to kill animals; theists want to promote religion; ineffective charities want to… raise funds? Not as directly opposed to what we’re doing.
We could certainly use more eloquent/impassioned public speakers on EA topics (assuming they are scrupulous, as you say), but I wouldn’t think of them as “bulldogs”—just regular advocates.
{
posts(input: {
terms: {
# view: "top"
meta: null # this seems to get both meta and non-meta posts
after: "10-1-2000"
before: "10-11-2020" # or some date in the future
}
}) {
results {
title
url
pageUrl
createdAt
}
}
}
Copy the output into a last5000posts.txt
Search for the keyword “prize”. In Linux one can use this with grep "prize" last5000posts.txt, or with grep -B 1 "prize" last5000posts.txt | sed 's/^.*: //' | sed 's/\"//g' > last500postsClean.txt to produce a cleaner output.
I’m considering taking the very +EV betting opportunities available with the US election with the money I plan to donate over the next 6 months, then donating the winnings (or not donating if I lose).
Some more discussion on my twitter here but I’m interested in thoughts from EAF members too. It’s not a huge amount of money either way.
Together with a few EA friends, I ended up betting a substantial amount of money on Biden. It went well for me, too, as well as for some of my friends. I think presidential elections present unusually good opportunities for both betting and arbitrage, so it may be worth coordinating some joint effort next time.
(As a note of historical interest, during the 2012 US election a small group of early EAs made some money arbitraging Intrade.)
There should maybe be an introductory guide for new LessWrong users coming in from the EA Forum, and vice versa.
I feel like my writing style (designed for EAF) is almost the same as that of LW-style rationalists, but not quite identical, and this is enough to be substantially less useful for the average audience member there.
For example, this identical question is a lot less popular on LessWrong than on the EA Forum, despite naively appearing to appeal to both audiences (and indeed if I were to guess at the purview of LW, to be closer to the mission of that site than that of the EA Forum).
The Emergent Ventures Prize is an example of a prize scheme that seems good to me: giving $100k prizes to great blogs, wherever on the internet they’re located.
I read every Tweet that uses the phrase “effective altruism” or “#effectivealtruism”. I don’t think there are many EA-themed Tweets that make novel points, rather than linking to existing material. I could easily be missing Tweets that don’t have these keywords, though. Are there any EA-themed Tweets you’re thinking of that really stood out as being good?
Tom Inglesby on nCoV response is one recent example from just the last few days. I’ve generally known Stefan Schubert, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Julia Galef, and others to make very insightful comments there. I’m sure there are very many other examples.
Generally speaking, though, the philosophy would be to go to the platforms that top contributors are actually using, and offer our services there, rather than trying to push them onto ours, or at least to complement the latter with the former.
I agree with this philosophy, but remain unsure about the extent to which strong material appears on various platforms (I sometimes do reach out to people who have written good blog posts or Facebook posts to send my regards and invite them to cross-post; this is a big part of Ben Kuhn’s recent posts have appeared on the Forum, and one of those did win a prize).
Aside from 1000-person-plus groups like “Effective Altruism” and “EA Hangout”, are there any Facebook groups that you think regularly feature strong contributions? (I’ve seen plenty of good posts come out of smaller groups, but given the sheer number of groups, I doubt that the list of those I check includes everything it should.)
*****
I follow all the Twitter accounts you mentioned. While I can’t think of recent top-level Tweets from those accounts that feel like good Prize candidates, I think the Tom Inglesby thread is great!
One benefit of the Forum Prize is that it (ideally) incentivizes people to come and post things on the Forum, and to put more effort into producing really strong posts. It also reaches people who deliberately worked to contribute to the community. If someone like Tom Inglesby was suddenly offered, say, $200 for writing a great Twitter thread, it’s very unclear to me whether this would lead to any change in his behavior (and it might come across as very odd). Maybe not including any money, but simply cross-posting the thread and granting some kind of honorary award, could be better.
Another benefit: The Forum is centralized, and it’s easy for judges to see every post. If someone wants to Tweet about EA and they aren’t already a central figure, we might have a hard time finding their material (and we’re much more likely to spot, by happenstance, posts made by people who have lots of followers).
That said, there’s merit to thinking about ways we can reach out to send strong complimentary signals to people who produce EA-relevant things even if they’re unaware of the movement’s existence. Thanks for these suggestions!
The Stanford Social Innovation Review makes the case (archive link) that new, promising interventions are almost never scaled up by already established, big NGOs.
I suppose I just assumed that scale ups happened regularly at big NGOs and I never bothered to look closely enough to notice that it didn’t. I find this very surprising.
The venerable Judge Easterbrook appears to understand harms from unaligned AI. In this excerpt, he invokes a favorite fictional example among the AI risk community:
Soppet v. Enhanced Recovery Co., LLC, 679 F.3d 637, 638–39 (7th Cir. 2012).
How would a therapist diagnose an EA mindset?
I wonder why I’m drawn to EA — particularly in terms of my personality. For example, I have a tendency to justify things (sometimes myself) and endorsing EA principles might simply be an extension of this. EA principles allow me to justify my choice of career, lifestyle, values, diet, etc.
Does anyone else see EA as an extension of their deep desire to justify things? Since justification is a defensive process, I wonder whether this has any relation to self-esteem or self-worth.
And, if EA doesn’t relate to a desire to justify things, is it simply another form of social signalling? Except we’re signalling to philosophers and computer scientists, who have unusual values (thus the unusual signals).
How would a therapist diagnose the EA mindset? That’s to say: if I began therapy tomorrow, and told my therapist, ‘I feel obliged to donate 10% of my income to charity. I feel obliged to work for an organisation trying to solve the world’s most pressing problems. I feel obliged to do both of these because I think that they could minimise the needless suffering of others more than any other course of action I can think of’. What conclusions would they draw about my personality?
You might find it helpful to look at this ethnography of an EA group. Also relevant is this analysis of the Big Five personality traits of respondents to the Rethink Charity community survey. It has statistical flaws, but one takeaway is that most EAs are high in openness. Finally, there’s this Global Optimum Podcast episode on the personality of EAs.
Justification and signalling explanations don’t seem especially compelling to me because in some sense, everything is justification and signaling. Also, I’m not sure if you’re hinting at this, but it’s unlikely that you’ll be diagnosed with a mental illness just for being drawn to / believing in EA, unless it significantly impedes your everyday functioning. Since I’m not a therapist, I don’t think I can comment further on what a therapist would say.
Would you be interested in a Cause Prioritization Newsletter? What would you want to read on it?
I’ll sign up and read if it’d be good 😊
What I’d be most interested in are the curation of
New suggestions for possible top cause areas
New (or less known) organizations or experts in the field
Examples of new methodologies
and generally, interesting new research on prioritization between and within practically any EA-relevant causes.
Add to (3) new explanations or additions to methodologies—e.g., I still haven’t found anything substantial about the idea of adding something like ‘urgence’ to the ITN framework.
Definitely! And I’ll raise by my general interest in thoughtful analyses of existing frameworks
Reading science fiction to build intuition about longtermism:
Throughout my involvement over the past 2 years leading and participating in EA fellowships, I’ve heard numerous fellows say something like “longtermism seems interesting and somewhat convincing, but I find it hard to think about and at times intractable”. This difficulty in thinking about how our current actions can have massive long-term impacts on timelines longer than say, a century, isn’t something most people coming into an intro to EA fellowship have thought about.
From my experience these students then, on average, are more likely to work on other EA cause areas like animal welfare/global poverty/etc.
I have never had difficulty thinking about longtermism. I suspect this is partly because I read a large amount of science fiction. In books like Foundation, The Three-Body Problem, and The Mote in God’s Eye, the stories unfold over hundreds or thousands of years, and the actions of characters at the beginning of the books dramatically affect entire civilizations generations later.
I encourage others in the EA community to think about whether there is a correlation between people who find longtermism not just academically persuasive but intuitive and people with exposure to this kind of science fiction. It may be useful for us to encourage others in the community to consume this type of science fiction to motivate the pursuit of working on long-term causes (though of course we don’t want people to then think of longtermism as “science fiction” in the worst sense of the word).
This is an interesting idea; thanks for writing it up!
I consider myself a “longtermist” and have read a lot of science fiction, but most examples I’ve seen in sci-fi of people affecting the future don’t feel convincing to me. To comment on some of your examples:
“Psychohistory” (Foundation) is fine as “the premise you have to accept to read the book”, but is very silly as an actual concept.
The Dark Forest trilogy (Three-Body Problem, etc.) has a few sections where we skip ahead into the future and see how things have developed, but the explanations for that development typically take up roughly a page and use a style of historical narrative that doesn’t really match what longtermist work feels like (rather than a few people or groups achieving influence, IIRC the explanation tends to be “humans became more like X, ergo thing Y happened”).
I feel like I’ve read a couple of books that really capture the process of changing the world over centuries, and the kinds of work that go into those changes, but no titles are coming to mind.
What I’ve found more helpful: Books that capture what it’s like to be at the mercy of some overwhelming, civilization-shattering force. These include On the Beach and Alas, Babylon (nuclear war) and books with realistically superintelligent or super-advanced aliens (the Dark Forest trilogy does pretty well here). I think people often struggle to understand how it would feel to contend with something fundamentally smarter than humans, and sci-fi gets that scary feeling across quite well.
Semi-aside: Have you read Canticle for Leibowitz? I barely remember exact details from the book, but I read it when I was very young, and plausibly it affected my priors on nuclear war somewhat, in a subtle/sneaky way.
You nailed it—Aasimov’s and Cixin Liu’s classics should be almost compulsory reading. However, it caught my eye you call Cixin Liu’s trilogy the Dark Forest Trilogy, instead of referring to it as something likeThe 3-body problem books or Trisolarian Trilogy or Remembrances of Earth’s Past.
What I enjoy most in these books is the challenge of maintaining something like long-term cooperation. To such a list I’d add something like The Ministry for the Future (someone should add a good review to this forum); but though it has wonderful passages, sometimes it’s irrealistic optimistic (or even simplistic, along the lines “capitalism is evil”) and takes a lot for granted.
I just misremembered the official name of the trilogy—Remembrance of Earth’s Past is correct.
‘Good’ news: as expected, as real interest rates fall, so do SDR, increasing the social cost of carbon. (not novelty, ok, but monetary policy-makers explicitly acknowledging it seems to be good)
Bad news: of course, it still seems to be higher than a normative SDR based on time-neutrality.
[HALF-BAKED IDEA—Fundraising through paid newsletters / text message courses.]
THE IDEA : Paid newsletters and paid text message courses should be considered as a potential earn -to-give entrepreneurship strategy.
More specifically, newsletters / text messages that are focused on sourcing items of interest for niche groups e.g. jobs, events, petitions, ideas, tools, content etc.
Some quick thoughts on why:
(WARNING: I am by no stretch of the imagination a fundraising expert, also this might be the longest short form ever)
Generally speaking, I don’t believe crowdfunding donations from the public is that effective, mainly due to a lack of social norms (most people don’t make time in their schedules to donate and even when they do, they are unlikely to share a charity they like with friends in the way they would share a product they like.)
For EA charities, I estimate this holds particularly true.
I believe the best way to fundraise from the general public is to sell a product they want (maybe with a bit of mark up) while being clear that you are trying to raise money for an altruistic cause.
I would suggest the ideal product would:
Maximise potential profit
Maximise ‘social influence gains’
Minimise potential losses
Minimise threat of competition
Limit potential harm
Broadly, digital products seem like the best way to do this.
Here are some rough thoughts on why I think item sourcing newsletters / text message idea seems like it would be a particularly good fit.
Crowdsourcing – This is possibly the most important reason. I would say the more crowdsourcing can be used in the creation and delivery of a service the more advantage a not-for-profit organisation is going to have as a provider over for-profits. The reason being, the more you can utilise crowdsourcing the more you can utilise volunteers and individuals are, presumably, more likely to volunteer for a not-for-profit than a for-profit.
Remote – Not all EAs are based around economic centres, limiting their access to many of the common EA career options. I believe a remote team could deliver a newsletter service.
Mass appeal – I would say that it is generally easier to make a big profit by getting a little bit of money out of a lot of customers than by getting a lot of money out of a few customers (even with current levels of wealth inequality).
Social Influence – If successful, the newsletters would amass a big audience which is an asset in itself.
Supply and demand—A general rule in economics is that the greater the supply of a product/service the cheaper it becomes. However, with digital products it seems this only hold up to a point. The supply of a digital product is practically unlimited, so, with a big enough customer base one might be able to make a profit while charging tiny amounts. But most consumers probably aren’t going to sweat getting their credit card out for a $1 transaction over a 10cents transaction. This could be mean that one could theoretically attain big profit margins. Moreover, the supply of a digital product is naturally matched to the demand, different newsletters will have different demands (depending on how niche they are) leading to different prices. So there will be no standard price for a newsletter in the same way there is for an apple. This ambiguity in pricing would make it easier to add a mark up as consumers would have no clear expectation for the price of a newsletter.
Simple but not too simple – The more complex the service / product the less likely one is to be able to create a competitive product. The simpler the service / product the more people will try to offer it. Newsletters seem to strike a nice balance.
Valuable but not too valuable – Finds a balance between being valuable enough to pay for, but no so valuable that consumers will spend a lot of time making sure they get the absolute best one – so one does not need to create the absolute best product on the market to succeed.
Minimal investment required – Small amount of time and money required to create MVP = minimal potential losses.
Plenty of room – Unlike with a lot of things, like insurance, there’s no clear limit on how many newsletters a person needs. So there should be plenty of room in the market. Moreover, there are countless ways that one can create a newsletter and plenty of niches to find.
Of course, we would need a name for an organisation that provides such a service, how about….
SOURCY MEDIA [Pronounced: ‘Saucy’].
Here are some ideas on what items could be sourced....
Opportunities (To do / To seize)
Jobs
Grants / Funds
Funding campaigns
Deals / Exclusives
Petitions
Social movements
Conventions / Crazes
Programs / Courses / Camps
Events / Experiences / Activities
Utilities and Inventory (To use / To have)
Digital tools
Physical tools
Services
Content / Material
Natural resources
Foods / Nutriments
Treatments / Medicine
Amusements / Stimulants
Learnings (To know / To follow)
Questions / Prompts / Problems
Affirmations / Reminders
Facts / Data / Observations
Stories / Anecdotes
Words / Phrases
Interpretations / Explanations
Opinions / Beliefs / Quotes
Theories / Models
Ideas / Tips
Rules / Heuristics / Principles
Techniques / Strategies / Hacks / Practices
Routines / Games / Rituals
Spaces (To go / To occupy)
Residences
Work spaces
Social spaces
Retreats
Entities (To collaborate with)
Communities
Individuals
Businesses
Public sector organisations
Meta
Directories / Lists / Maps
Marketplaces / Platforms
Thoughts?
Three cheers for long Shortform posts! Totally fine to spell out a half-baked idea here, at whatever length.
Anyway, one of the first questions I always want to ask when I hear a business idea: What’s an example of this type of business succeeding?
Clearly, there are successful people writing newsletters on Substack. But did any of them:
a) Start with a fairly small audience, many/most of whom were already giving them money without expecting something in return?
b) Try to crowdsource content from many sources, instead of having a single author be the driving force/personality behind the newsletter?
There may be newsletters in this category, but I expect that they are quite rare.
Additionally, most EA orgs actively want their ideas to be free, because they want as many people as possible to hear them, and this is more valuable to them than whatever money they would get from a much smaller paid audience. For example, even if 80K could convert their 100,000+ newsletter subscribers into an audience of 10,000 people paying $5/month (no small task), I don’t know if they would want to, given how many fewer people would get job leads from them under that scenario.
As far as newsletters created by individual entrepreneurs, this is a reasonable business idea like many others. You can find lots of online guides to building an audience for your copywriting, coaches to help you get started, clubs where people share feedback on each other’s writing, and so on. But like most reasonable businesses, this one is fairly competitive and tough to succeed in (no such thing as a free lunch!). It will be a reasonable thing to do for a few EAs, maybe, but doesn’t stand out to me as more promising than other types of startups.
This doesn’t make it a bad idea—just one of many, many things that people should consider if they want to build a business.
Thanks for the feedback Aaron!
With regards to EA orgs e.g. 80,000 hours. I wasn’t trying to suggest that EA orgs have their own paid newsletters. Rather, I was suggesting that a separate not-for-profit organisation could be set up specifically for creating paid newsletters (on any topic) while stating that said organisation is trying to raise money for effective charities. The organisation would be made of individuals and teams who each run different paid newsletters under one umbrella. (These potentially could be subsidiary companies; I haven’t really thought through all the business legal stuff).
Sorry, I should have been clearer on this.
The everything newsletter is a combination of newsletters which illustrates how an umbrella organisation with multiple newsletters could work.
With regards to finding examples, I haven’t deep dived into this, but I do know that Product Hunt (bought by AngelList) started out basically as an e-mail list with a) a small audience and b) crowdsourcing their content. Its now morphed into something a bit different than a paid newsletter. Though it does have its Founders Club offering which isn’t that different. (I think newsletters tie in very well with community platforms like those which can be built with tools like circle).
Building an audience does seem like it would be the big hurdle. But I think this would give the EA community an advantage in this arena. If the EA community knows that there is an organisation trying to raise money for effective charities, then they could direct people in their social media networks towards the newsletters. This should provide a big enough ‘snowball’ to start with. Presumably, the combined network of everyone in the EA community is fairly large (though I don’t have figures on this—there is probably a lot of EAs in the followings of EA members and obviously it would be non-EAs that would be the target audience).
Donor Advised Funds with no minimum contribution requirements
Fidelity Charitable and Schwab Charitable recently eliminated the minimum initial contribution requirements for their donor-advised funds.
Fidelity and Schwab are major financial services companies. Their nonprofit arms operate donor-advised funds (DAFs), which are tools to make donating more convenient and tax-efficient (see Aaron Hamlin’s succinct summaryfor more info). Like many financial services companies, Fidelity and Schwab previously required customers to contribute ~$5,000 in order to open a DAF. Now, they’ll let you open a DAF with any initial contribution.
This is particularly exciting for donors interested in patient philanthropy: the idea that we could maximize the impact of our donations by donating later. To learn more about patient philanthropy and see if this approach might be right for you, see:
80,000 Hours Podcast: Phil Trammell on patient philanthropy
Phil Trammell’s paper on patient philanthropy
Previous EA Forum posts:
The case for investing to give later
Crucial questions about optimal timing of work and donations
Estimating the philanthropic discount rate
Are we living at the most influential time in history?
Now that it’s easy to open a DAF with a contribution of any size, it’s a great time to consider patient philanthropy.
Cheers to the Giving Season!!
*Special thanks to Cameron Meyer Shorb (Wild Animal Initiative) for the feedback!
CoronaVirus and Famine
The Good Judgement Open forecasting tournament gives a 66% chance for the answer to “Will the UN declare that a famine exists in any part of Ethiopia, Kenya, Somalia, Tanzania, or Uganda in 2020?”
https://www.gjopen.com/questions/1559-will-the-un-declare-that-a-famine-exists-in-any-part-of-ethiopia-kenya-somalia-tanzania-or-uganda-in-2020
I think that the 66% is a slight overestimate. But nonetheless, if a famine does hit, it would be terrible, as other countries might not be able to spare enough attention due to the current pandemic.
https://ourworldindata.org/what-does-a-famine-declaration-declare
https://fews.net/
https://www.gjopen.com/questions/1559-will-the-un-declare-that-a-famine-exists-in-any-part-of-ethiopia-kenya-somalia-tanzania-or-uganda-in-2020 (registration needed to see)
It is not clear to me what an altruist who realizes that can do, as an individual:
A famine is likely to hit this region (but hasn’t hit yet)
It is likely to be particularly bad.
Donating to the World Food Programme, which is already doing work on the matter, might be a promising answer, but I haven’t evaluated the programe, nor compared it to other potentially promising options (see here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/wpaZRoLFJy8DynwQN/the-best-places-to-donate-for-covid-19, or https://www.againstmalaria.com/)
https://donatenow.wfp.org/wfp/~my-donation
https://www.wfp.org/
https://insight.wfp.org/coronavirus-wfp-ready-to-rise-to-the-challenge-8178a4d0aeac
Ethiopia’s Tigray region has seen famine before: why it could happen again—The Conversation Africa
https://theconversation.com/ethiopias-tigray-region-has-seen-famine-before-why-it-could-happen-again-150181
Tue, 17 Nov 2020 13:38:00 GMT
The Tigray region is now seeing armed conflict. I’m at 5-10%+ that it develops into famine (regardless of whether it ends up meeting the rather stringent UN conditions for the term to be used) (but have yet to actually look into the base rate). I’ve sent an email to FEWs.net to see if they update their forecasts.
Did you mean to post this using the Markdown editor? Currently, the formatting looks a bit odd from a reader’s perspective.
I feel increasingly unsympathetic to hedonism (and maybe experientalism generally?). Yes, emotions matter, and the strength of emotions could be taken to mean how much something matters, but if you separate a cow and her calf and they’re distressed by this, the appropriate response for their sake is not to drug or fool them until they feel better, it’s to reunite them. What they want is each other, not to feel better. Sometimes I think about something bad in the world that makes me sad; I don’t think you do me any favour by just taking away my sadness; I don’t want to stop feeling sad, what I want is for the bad in the world to be addressed.
Rather than affect being what matters in itself, maybe affect is a signal for what matters and its intensity tells us how much it matters. Hedonism as normally understood would therefore be like Goodhart’s law: it ignores the objects of our emotions.
Of course, often we do just want to feel better, and that matters, too. If someone wants to not suffer, then of course they should not suffer.
Related: wireheading, the experience machine, complexity of value.
Reasons why upvotes on the EA forum and LW don’t correlate that well with impact .
More easily accessible content, or more introductory material gets upvoted more.
Material which gets shared more widely gets upvoted more.
Content which is more prone to bikeshedding gets upvoted more.
Posts which are beautifully written are more upvoted.
Posts written by better known authors are more upvoted (once you’ve seen this, you can’t unsee).
The time at which a post is published affects how many upvotes it gets.
Other random factors, such as whether other strong posts are published at the same time, also affect the number of upvotes.
Not all projects are conducive to having a post written about them.
The function from value to upvotes is concave (e.g., like a logarithm or like a square root), in that a project which results in a post with a 100 upvotes is probably more than 5 times as valuable as 5 posts with 20 upvotes each. This is what you’d expect if the supply of upvotes was limited.
Upvotes suffer from inflation as EA forum gets populated more, so that a post which would have gathered 50 upvotes two years might gather 100 upvotes now.
Upvotes may not take into account the relationship between projects, or other indirect effects. For example, projects which contribute to existing agendas are probably more valuable than otherwise equal standalone projects, but this might not be obvious from the text.
...
I agree that the correlation between number of upvotes on EA forum and LW posts/comments and impact isn’t very strong. (My sense is that it’s somewhere between weak and strong, but not very weak or very strong.) I also agree that most of the reasons you list are relevant.
But how I’d frame this is that—for example—a post being more accessible increases the post’s expected upvotes even more than it increases its expected impact. I wouldn’t say “Posts that are more accessible get more upvotes, therefore the correlation is weak”, because I think increased accessibility will indeed increase a post’s impact (holding other factor’s constant).
Same goes for many of the other factors you list.
E.g., more sharing tends to both increase a post’s impact (more readers means more opportunity to positively influence people) and signal that the post would have a positive impact on each reader (as that is one factor—among many—in whether people share things). So the mere fact that sharing probably tends to increase upvotes to some extent doesn’t necessarily weaken the correlation between upvotes and impact. (Though I’d guess that sharing does increase upvotes more than it increases/signals impact, so this comment is more like a nitpick than a very substantive disagreement.)
To make it clear, the claim is that the number karma for a forum post on a project does not correlate well with the project’s direct impact? Rather than, say, that a karma score of a post correlates well with the impact of the post itself on the community?
I’d say it also doesn’t correlate that well with its total (direct+indirect) impact either, but yes. And I was thinking more in contrast to the karma score being an ideal measure of total impact; I don’t have thoughts to share here on the impact of the post itself on the community.
Thanks, that makes sense.
I think that for me, I upvote according to how much I think a post itself is valuable for me or for the community as a whole. At least, that’s what I’m trying to do when I’m thinking about it logically.
Collection of sources relevant to impact certificates/impact purchases/similar
Certificates of impact—Paul Christiano, 2014
The impact purchase—Paul Christiano and Katja Grace, ~2015 (the whole site is relevant, not just the home page)
The Case for Impact Purchase | Part 1 - Linda Linsefors, 2020
Making Impact Purchases Viable—casebash, 2020
Plan for Impact Certificate MVP—lifelonglearner, 2020
Impact Prizes as an alternative to Certificates of Impact—Ozzie Gooen, 2019
Altruistic equity allocation—Paul Christiano, 2019
Social impact bond—Wikipedia (highlighted as relevant by Toby Ord)
Health Impact Fund—Wikipedia (highlighted as relevant by Toby Ord)
I intend to add to this list over time. If you know of other relevant work, please mention it in a comment. I also may create a tag for relevant posts.
oh, of course, for-profit charities are a thing! that makes sense
I learned about it in “Economics without Illusion”, chapter 8.
it’s not because your organization’s product/service/goal is to help other people and your customers are philanthropists that you can’t make a profit.
profitable charities might increase competition to provide more effective altruism, and so still provide more value even though it makes a profit (maybe)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charitable_for-profit_entity
x-post: https://www.facebook.com/mati.roy.09/posts/10159007824884579
Could EA benefit from having a “bulldog”?
That is, a pugnacious (but scrupulous) public advocate of EA and EA-adjacent ideas. In the EA community currently, who might come closest to being something like EA’s bulldog?
More precisely, I’m thinking of a hybrid between, say, Christopher Hitchens and Peter Singer (or perhaps Derek Parfit, for added dryness). A fiery, polemical wit married to a calm, analytical rigor.
A good, non-EA -affiliated example of this style is Alex J. O’Connor, better known as Cosmic Skeptic on YouTube, a student of philosophy at Oxford whose confrontational yet nuanced content on atheism and veganism is rather popular now (a good example is his speech on veganism and animal rights). On his podcast, he’s interviewed Peter Singer, and frequently cites Hitchens as an inspiration.
I suspect that many EAs would be skeptical and cautious of this approach, for various reasons. Certain versions of it would appear to cut against certain EA features commonly regarded as virtues: considerateness and cooperation (and their encouragement), epistemic modesty (e.g. focusing heavily on uncertainties), compassion in disagreement, respecting norms of agreeable conduct, etc.
Similarly, it seems to carry reputational risks, including a risk of doing accidental harm to EA’s public image. In this sense, it risks being a hard-to-reverse decision, resulting in more costs than benefits (William MacAskill discusses this here). Maybe this is reason enough for an advocate of this kind not to wish to be publicly associated with EA even while supporting and highlighting its cause-areas.
On the other hand, perhaps at least some of this style can attract and/or sustain more positive, public attention than milder outreach approaches, and perhaps even shape public opinion more effectively.
There’s much more to say, but this is already much longer than I intended. I’d love to read any thoughts on this, and/or to be pointed in the direction of previous, related discussion.
I feel like the main role of a bulldog is to fend off the fiery, polemical enemies of a movement. Atheism and veganism (and even AI safety, kind of) have clear opponents; I don’t think the same is especially true of EA (as a collection of causes).
There are people who argue for localism, or the impracticality of measuring impact, but I can’t think of the last time I’ve seen one of those people have a bad influence on EA. The meat industry wants to kill animals; theists want to promote religion; ineffective charities want to… raise funds? Not as directly opposed to what we’re doing.
I suppose we did have the Will MacAskill/Giles Fraser debate at one point, though. MacAskill also took on Peter Buffet in an op-ed column. I don’t know how he feels about those efforts in retrospect.
We could certainly use more eloquent/impassioned public speakers on EA topics (assuming they are scrupulous, as you say), but I wouldn’t think of them as “bulldogs”—just regular advocates.
This Letter made me feel like there can be organized opposition from ineffective charities
Thank you Aaron, these are great points!
Prizes in the EA Forum and LW.
I was looking at things other people had tried before.
EA Forum
How should we run the EA Forum Prize?
Cause-specific Effectiveness Prize (Project Plan)
Announcing Li Wenliang Prize for forecasting the COVID-19 outbreak
Announcing the Bentham Prize
$100 Prize to Best Argument Against Donating to the EA Hotel
Essay contest: general considerations for evaluating small-scale giving opportunities ($300 for winning submission)
Cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics being an EA cause area
Cause-specific Effectiveness Prize (Project Plan)
Debrief: “cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics”
Cash prizes for the best arguments against psychedelics being an EA cause area
A black swan energy prize
AI alignment prize winners and next round
$500 prize for anybody who can change our current top choice of intervention
The Most Good—promotional prizes for EA chapters from Peter Singer, CEA, and 80,000 Hours
LW (on the last 5000 posts)
Over $1,000,000 in prizes for COVID-19 work from Emergent Ventures
The Dualist Predict-O-Matic ($100 prize)
Seeking suggestions for EA cash-prize contest
Announcement: AI alignment prize round 4 winners
A Gwern comment on the Prize literature
[prize] new contest for Spaced Repetition literature review ($365+)
[Prize] Essay Contest: Cryonics and Effective Altruism
Announcing the Quantified Health Prize
Oops Prize update
Some thoughts on: https://groups.google.com/g/lw-public-goods-team
AI Alignment Prize: Round 2 due March 31, 2018
Quantified Health Prize results announced
FLI awards prize to Arkhipov’s relatives
Progress and Prizes in AI Alignment
Prize for probable problems
Prize for the best introduction to the LessWrong source ($250)
How to replicate.
Go to the EA forum API or to the LW API and input the following query:
Copy the output into a last5000posts.txt
Search for the keyword “prize”. In Linux one can use this with
grep "prize" last5000posts.txt, or withgrep -B 1 "prize" last5000posts.txt | sed 's/^.*: //' | sed 's/\"//g' > last500postsClean.txtto produce a cleaner output.Can’t believe I forgot the D-Prize, which awards $20,000 USD for teams to distribute proven poverty interventions.
I’m considering taking the very +EV betting opportunities available with the US election with the money I plan to donate over the next 6 months, then donating the winnings (or not donating if I lose).
Some more discussion on my twitter here but I’m interested in thoughts from EAF members too. It’s not a huge amount of money either way.
This went well :) Congrats EAF meta, Rethink, and GFI on your winnings.
Together with a few EA friends, I ended up betting a substantial amount of money on Biden. It went well for me, too, as well as for some of my friends. I think presidential elections present unusually good opportunities for both betting and arbitrage, so it may be worth coordinating some joint effort next time.
(As a note of historical interest, during the 2012 US election a small group of early EAs made some money arbitraging Intrade.)
I ended up doing this.
crossposted from LessWrong
There should maybe be an introductory guide for new LessWrong users coming in from the EA Forum, and vice versa.
I feel like my writing style (designed for EAF) is almost the same as that of LW-style rationalists, but not quite identical, and this is enough to be substantially less useful for the average audience member there.
For example, this identical question is a lot less popular on LessWrong than on the EA Forum, despite naively appearing to appeal to both audiences (and indeed if I were to guess at the purview of LW, to be closer to the mission of that site than that of the EA Forum).
Possible EA intervention: just like the EA Forum Prizes, but for the best Tweets (from an EA point-of-view) in a given time window.
Reasons this might be better than the EA Forum Prize:
1) Popular tweets have greater reach than popular forum posts, so this could promote EA more effectively
2) The prizes could go to EAs who are not regular forum users, which could also help to promote EA more effectively.
One would have to check the rules and regulations.
The Emergent Ventures Prize is an example of a prize scheme that seems good to me: giving $100k prizes to great blogs, wherever on the internet they’re located.
I read every Tweet that uses the phrase “effective altruism” or “#effectivealtruism”. I don’t think there are many EA-themed Tweets that make novel points, rather than linking to existing material. I could easily be missing Tweets that don’t have these keywords, though. Are there any EA-themed Tweets you’re thinking of that really stood out as being good?
Tom Inglesby on nCoV response is one recent example from just the last few days. I’ve generally known Stefan Schubert, Eliezer Yudkowsky, Julia Galef, and others to make very insightful comments there. I’m sure there are very many other examples.
Generally speaking, though, the philosophy would be to go to the platforms that top contributors are actually using, and offer our services there, rather than trying to push them onto ours, or at least to complement the latter with the former.
I agree with this philosophy, but remain unsure about the extent to which strong material appears on various platforms (I sometimes do reach out to people who have written good blog posts or Facebook posts to send my regards and invite them to cross-post; this is a big part of Ben Kuhn’s recent posts have appeared on the Forum, and one of those did win a prize).
Aside from 1000-person-plus groups like “Effective Altruism” and “EA Hangout”, are there any Facebook groups that you think regularly feature strong contributions? (I’ve seen plenty of good posts come out of smaller groups, but given the sheer number of groups, I doubt that the list of those I check includes everything it should.)
*****
I follow all the Twitter accounts you mentioned. While I can’t think of recent top-level Tweets from those accounts that feel like good Prize candidates, I think the Tom Inglesby thread is great!
One benefit of the Forum Prize is that it (ideally) incentivizes people to come and post things on the Forum, and to put more effort into producing really strong posts. It also reaches people who deliberately worked to contribute to the community. If someone like Tom Inglesby was suddenly offered, say, $200 for writing a great Twitter thread, it’s very unclear to me whether this would lead to any change in his behavior (and it might come across as very odd). Maybe not including any money, but simply cross-posting the thread and granting some kind of honorary award, could be better.
Another benefit: The Forum is centralized, and it’s easy for judges to see every post. If someone wants to Tweet about EA and they aren’t already a central figure, we might have a hard time finding their material (and we’re much more likely to spot, by happenstance, posts made by people who have lots of followers).
That said, there’s merit to thinking about ways we can reach out to send strong complimentary signals to people who produce EA-relevant things even if they’re unaware of the movement’s existence. Thanks for these suggestions!
For those interested in US election betting strategies, I’m hosting a Discord here: https://discord.gg/dHXrHdXnRD.
The Stanford Social Innovation Review makes the case (archive link) that new, promising interventions are almost never scaled up by already established, big NGOs.
I suppose I just assumed that scale ups happened regularly at big NGOs and I never bothered to look closely enough to notice that it didn’t. I find this very surprising.
Rather than using Facebook as a way to collect EA jobs we should use an airtable form
1) Individuals finding jobs could put all the details in, saving time for whoever would have to do this process at 80k time.
2) Airtable can post directly to facebook, so everyone would still see it https://community.airtable.com/t/posting-to-social-media-automatically/20987
3) Some people would find it quicker. Personally, I’d prefer an airtable form to inputting it to facebook manually every time.
Ideally we should find websites which often publish useful jobs and then scrape them regularly.
It would be good to easily be able to export jobs from the EA job board.
I suggest at some stage having up and downvoting of jobs would be useful.