I graduated from Georgetown University in December, 2021 with degrees in economics, mathematics and a philosophy minor. There, I founded and helped to lead Georgetown Effective Altruism. Over the last few years recent years, I’ve interned at the Department of the Interior, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and Nonlinear.
It’s personal taste, but for me the high standards (if implicit) - not only in reasoning quality but also as you say, formality (and I’d add comprehensiveness/covering all your bases) are a much bigger disincentive to posting than dry/serious tone (which maybe I just don’t mind a ton).
I’m not even sure this is bad; possibly lower standards would be worse all things considered. But still, it’s a major disincentive to publishing.
@MHR🔸@Laura Duffy, @AbsurdlyMax and I have been raising money for the EA Animal Welfare Fund on Twitter and Bluesky, and today is the last day to donate!
If we raise $3k more today I will transform my room into an EA paradise complete with OWID charts across the walls, a literal bednet, a shrine, and more (and of course post all this online)! Consider donating if and only if you wouldn’t use the money for a better purpose!
See some more fun discussion and such by following the replies and quote-tweets here:
But I think you’re basically spot-on; we’re like a dozen people in a Slack, all with relatively low capacity for various reasons, trying to bootstrap a legit organization.
The “bootstrap” analogy is apt here because we are basically trying to hire the leadership/managerial and operational capacity that is generally required to do things like “run a hiring round,” if that makes any sense.
So yeah, the idea is volunteers run a hiring round, and my sense is that some of the haziness of the picture comes from the fact that what thing(s) we’ll be hiring for depends largely on how much money we’ll be able to raise, which is what we’re trying to suss out right now.
All this is complicated by the fact that everyone involved has their own takes and as a sort of proto-organization we lack the decision-making and communications procedures and infrastructure that allows like OpenPhil/Apple/the Supreme Court to act as a coherent, unified agent. Like I personally think we should strongly prioritize hiring a full time lead, but I think others disagree, and I don’t want to claim to speak to SFF!
And thanks for surfacing a sort of hazy set of considerations that I suspect others were also wondering about, if implicitly!
To expand a bit on the funding point (and speaking for myself only):
I’d consider the $15k-$100k range what makes sense as a preliminary funding round, taking into account the high opportunity cost of EA animal welfare funding dollars. This is to say that I think SFF could in fact use much more than that, but the merits and cost effectiveness of the project will be a lot clearer after spending this first $100k; it is in large part paying for value of information.
Again speaking for myself only, my inside view is that the $100k figure is too low of an upper bound for preliminary funding; maybe I’d double it.
Speaking for myself (not other coauthors), I agree that $15k is low and would describe that as the minimum plausible amount to hire for the roles described (in part because of the willingness of at least one prospective researcher to work for quite cheap compared to what I perceive as standard among EA orgs, even in animal welfare).
IIRC I threw the $100k amount out as a reasonable amount we could ~promise to deploy usefully in the short term. It was a very hasty BOTEC-type take by me: something like $30k for the roles described + $70k for a full-time project lead.
~All of the EV from the donation election probably comes from nudging OpenPhil toward the realization that they’re pretty dramatically out of line with “consensus EA” in continuing to give most marginal dollars to global health. If this was explicitly thought through, brilliant.
(See this comment for sourcing and context on the table, which was my attempt to categorize all OP grants not too long ago)
I didn’t have a good response to @DanielFilan, and I’m pretty inclined to defer to orgs like CEA to make decisions about how to use their own scarce resources.
At least for EA Global Boston 2024 (which ended yesterday), there was the option to pay a “cost covering” ticket fee (of what I’m told is $1000).[1]
All this is to say that I am now more confident (although still <80%) that marginal rejected applicants who are willing to pay their cost-covering fee would be good to admit.[2]
In part this stems from an only semi-legible background stance that, on the whole, less impressive-seeming people have more ~potential~ and more to offer than I think “elite EA” (which would those running EAG admissions) tend to think. And this, in turn, has a lot to do with the endogeneity/path dependence of I’d hastily summarize as “EA involvement.”
That is, many (most?) people need a break-in point to move from something like “basically convinced that EA is good, interested in the ideas and consuming content, maybe donating 10%” to anything more ambitious.
For some, that comes in the form of going to an elite college with a vibrant EA group/community. Attending EAG is another—or at least could be. But if admission is dependent on doing the kind of things and/or having the kinds of connections that a person might only pursue after getting on such an on-ramp, you have a vicious cycle of endogenous rejection.
The impetus for writing this is seeing a person who was rejected with some characteristics that seem plausibly pretty representative of a typical marginal EAG rejectee:
College educated but not via an elite university
Donates 10%, mostly to global health
Normal-looking middle or upper-middle class career
Interested in EA ideas but not a huge amount to show for it
Never attended EAG
Of course n=1, this isn’t a tremendous amount of evidence, I don’t have strictly more information than the admissions folks, the optimal number of false-negatives is not zero, etc., etc. But if a person with those above characteristics who is willing to write a reasonably thoughtful application and spend their personal time and money traveling to and taking part in EA Global (and, again, covering their cost)[3] is indeed likely to get rejected, I just straightforwardly think that admission has too high a bar; does CEA really think such a person is actively harmful to the event on net?
I don’t want to say that there is literally zero potential downside from admitting more people and “diluting the attendee pool” for lack of a more thoughtful term, but it’s not immediately obvious to me what that downside would be especially at the current margin (say for example a 25% increase in the number of attendees, not a 2000% increase). And, needless to say, there is a lot of potential upside via both the impact of this marginal attendee themselves and via the information/experience/etc. that they bring to the whole group.
If this were an econ paper, I’d probably want to discuss the fiscal relevance of marginal vs average cost-covering tickets. I suspect that the “cost covering ticket” actually advertised is based on the average cost, but I’m not sure.
If this is true, and marginal cost < average cost as seems intuitive, then admitting a marginal attendee who then pays the average cost would be financially net-positive for CEA.
1. Marginal animal welfare cost effectiveness seems to robustly beat global health interventions. It may look more like 5x or 1000x but it is very hard indeed to get that number below 1 (I do think both are probably in fact good ex ante at least, so think the number is positive).
Spending on corporate cage-free campaigns for egg-laying hens is robustly[8] cost-effective under nearly all reasonable types and levels of risk aversion considered here.
“Using welfare ranges based roughly on Rethink Priorities’ results, spending on corporate cage-free campaigns averts over an order of magnitude more suffering than the most robust global health and development intervention, Against Malaria Foundation. This result holds for almost any level of risk aversion and under any model of risk aversion.”
2. The difference in magnitude of cost effectiveness (under any plausible understanding of what that means) between MakeAWish (or personal consumption spending for that matter) and AMF is smaller than between AMF (or pick your favorite) and The Humane League or AWF.
So it is more important to convince someone to give to e.g. the EA animal welfare fund if they were previously giving to AMF than to convince a non-donor to give that same amount of money to AMF.
At least to me, this seems counterintuitive, contrary to vibes and social/signaling effects, and also robustly true.
3. What people intuitively think of as the “certainty” that comes along with AMF et al doesn’t really exist. To quote my own tweet:
Yes, you can get robust estimates for “E[short run human deaths by malaria prevented per marginal dollar]” but the 2nd, …,nth order effects don’t disappear (or cancel out by default!) just bc u choose not to try to model them
4. The tractability of the two cause areas is similar...
5. But animal welfare receives way less funding. From the same comment as above:
Under standard EA “on the margin” reasoning, this shouldn’t really matter, but I analyzed OP’s grants data and found that human GCR has been consistently funded 6-7x more than animal welfare (here’s my tweet thread this is from)
SAN FRANCISCO, Sept 25 (Reuters) - ChatGPT-maker OpenAI is working on a plan to restructure its core business into a for-profit benefit corporation that will no longer be controlled by its non-profit board, people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a move that will make the company more attractive to investors.
The case for a legal challenge seems hugely overdetermined to me:
Stop/delay/complicate the restructuring, and otherwise make life appropriately hard for Sam Altman
Settle for a large huge amount of money that can be used to do a huge amount of good
Signal that you can’t just blatantly take advantage of OpenPhil/EV/EA as you please without appropriate challenge
I know OpenPhil has a pretty hands-off ethos and vibe; this shouldn’t stop them from acting with integrity when hands-on legal action is clearly warranted
Thanks and I think your second footnote makes an excellent distinction that I failed to get across well in my post.
I do think it’s at least directionally an “EA principle” that “best” and “right” should go together, although of course there’s plenty of room for naive first-order calculation critiques, heuristics/intuitions/norms that might push against some less nuanced understanding of “best”.
I still think there’s a useful conceptual distinction to be made between these terms, but maybe those ancillary (for lack of a better word) considerations relevant to what one thinks is the “best” use of money blur the line enough to make it too difficult to distinguish these in practice.
Re: your last paragraph, I want to emphasize that my dispute is with the terms “using EA principles”. I have no doubt whatsoever about the first part, “genuinely interested in making the world better”
Thanks, it’s possible I’m mistaken over the degree to which “direct resources to the place you think needs them most” is a consensus-EA principle.
Also, I recognize that “genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles” is implicitly value-laden, and to be clear I do wish it was more the case, but I also genuinely intend my claim to be an observation that might have pessimistic implications depending on other beliefs people may have rather than an insult or anything like it, if that makes any sense.
How much do you trust other EA Forum users to be genuinely interested in making the world better using EA principles?
This is one thing I’ve updated down quite a bit over the last year.
It seems to me that relatively few self-identified EA donors mostly or entirely give to the organization/whatever that they would explicitly endorse as being the single best recipient of a marginal dollar (do others disagree?)
Of course the more important question is whether most EA-inspired dollars are given in such a way (rather than most donors). Unfortunately, I think the answer to this is “no” as well, seeing as OpenPhil continues to donate a majority of dollars to human global health and development[1] (I threw together a Claude artifact that lets you get a decent picture of how OpenPhil has funded cause areas over time and in aggregate)[2]
Edit: to clarify, it could be the case that others have object-level disagreements about what the best use of a marginal dollar is. Clearly this is sometimes the case, but it’s not what I am getting at here. I am trying to get at the phenomenon where people implicitly say/reason “yes, EA principles imply that the best thing to do would be to donate to X, but I am going to donate to Y instead.” I’m guessing this mostly takes the form of people failing to endorse that they’re donations are optimally directed rather than that they do a bunch of ground-up reasoning and then decide to ignore the conclusion it gives, though.
Data is a few days old and there’s a bit of judgement about how to bin various subcategories of grants, but I doubt the general picture would change much if others redid the analysis/binning
It’s personal taste, but for me the high standards (if implicit) - not only in reasoning quality but also as you say, formality (and I’d add comprehensiveness/covering all your bases) are a much bigger disincentive to posting than dry/serious tone (which maybe I just don’t mind a ton).
I’m not even sure this is bad; possibly lower standards would be worse all things considered. But still, it’s a major disincentive to publishing.