Aaron Gertler(Aaron L. Gertler)

• Aaron Gertler 11 Aug 2020 1:36 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: james_aung’s comment on: The UK as an Effec­tive Altruist

  Well, that ex­plains the origi­nal ti­tle! I still think a ti­tle change would be helpful; I had to read this ti­tle a few times to make sure I hadn’t missed a word.

• Aaron Gertler 10 Aug 2020 21:27 UTC

  5 points

  on: The UK as an Effec­tive Altruist

  Could you please use a more de­scrip­tive ti­tle for this post?

  I think this line from your in­tro­duc­tion would work as a ti­tle: “UK for­eign aid policy through an EA lens”

• Aaron Gertler 10 Aug 2020 11:47 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III’s comment on: The world is full of wasted motion

  Neel reached out to me to ask whether any of his posts seemed like a rea­son­able fit for the Fo­rum. I men­tioned this one speci­fi­cally, be­cause I think al­most all the points here can eas­ily be ap­plied to al­tru­is­tic work and EA does care about re­duc­ing “wasted mo­tion” (in the sense of effort go­ing to­ward lower-im­pact in­ter­ven­tions).

  While LW is a bet­ter over­all fo­rum for ma­te­rial on per­sonal de­vel­op­ment and crit­i­cal think­ing, I don’t mind hav­ing some such con­tent on the Fo­rum; some peo­ple read this site and not LW, and I wouldn’t want them to miss all the posts like this one.

• Aaron Gertler 8 Aug 2020 8:16 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Gregory_Lewis’s comment on: What is the in­crease in ex­pected value of effec­tive al­tru­ist Wayne Hsi­ung be­ing mayor of Berkeley in­stead of its cur­rent in­cum­bent?

  Where does this quote come from?

• Aaron Gertler 8 Aug 2020 8:15 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Dale’s comment on: ava­cyn’s Shortform

  That’s the kind of source I was look­ing for; thanks for let­ting me know when it came up.

• Aaron Gertler 7 Aug 2020 7:47 UTC

  8 points

  on: What is the in­crease in ex­pected value of effec­tive al­tru­ist Wayne Hsi­ung be­ing mayor of Berkeley in­stead of its cur­rent in­cum­bent?

  Dony: Since we just posted our policy on poli­ti­cal Fo­rum con­tent, I wanted to let you know that this post will be kept in the “Per­sonal Blog” cat­e­gory (as it en­dorses a spe­cific elec­toral can­di­date). How­ever, I think it’s an ex­cel­lent ques­tion, and I would en­courage you to pro­mote this post on Face­book/​Red­dit/​etc.

  Per­son­ally, I doubt Wayne’s vic­tory would “un­lock ad­di­tional poli­ti­cal wins” to any great ex­tent; Berkeley is a small city, and I can’t think of many (any?) other EA lead­ers who want to be­come elected lead­ers.

  I do think it would be in­ter­est­ing to see how EA ideas could be im­ple­mented on the level of city policy, and Wayne could be the source of a lot of pos­i­tive me­dia cov­er­age of EA ideas (jour­nal­ists like Berkeley, and Wayne has solid me­dia ex­pe­rience, e.g. his Ezra Klein in­ter­view).

  How­ever, there’s also some risk that Berkeley’s poli­tics are such that a mayor whose ideas aren’t in line with those of e.g. most City Coun­cil mem­bers might strug­gle a lot. Berkeley is one of the most pro­gres­sive cities in the U.S.: if they haven’t made strong progress in ad­dress­ing poverty/​cli­mate change already, I’m not sure what Wayne’s lead­er­ship would add.

  On that topic, I’m cu­ri­ous about how Wayne’s poli­cies and ap­proach differ from those of the cur­rent mayor. I can see what he wants to do on his site, but not what he thinks Jesse Ar­reguín is wrong about (or what he hasn’t im­ple­mented well as mayor, even if he had the right ideas).

Poli­tics on the EA Forum

• Aaron Gertler 7 Aug 2020 7:17 UTC

  4 points

  on: Pro­pose and vote on po­ten­tial tags

  I’ve ed­ited this post to in­clude our offi­cial man­date at the top. Thanks for cre­at­ing it, MichaelA!

Mis­con­cep­tions about effec­tive al­tru­ism (80,000 Hours)

• Aaron Gertler 6 Aug 2020 20:08 UTC

  2 points

  on: EA con­sid­er­a­tions re­gard­ing in­creas­ing poli­ti­cal polarization

  I en­joyed this blog post on dis­analo­gies be­tween the Cul­tural Revolu­tion and pre­sent-day Amer­i­can poli­ti­cal un­rest. An ex­cerpt:

  [The Cul­tural Revolu­tion] was egged on, di­rected, and ma­nipu­lated by a dic­ta­tor who feared he had lost con­trol of you might think of as the Chi­nese “deep-state” and the ex­ist­ing poli­ti­cal class. Again, a world of differ­ence from the cur­rent en­vi­ron­ment, where the pow­ers that be are filled with protest-sym­pa­thiz­ers and the poli­ti­cal class provide ac­tive cover for the ex­tremes of the cur­rent move­ment. The ma­jor in­sti­tu­tions of Amer­i­can life are be­hind this move­ment: the ma­jor in­sti­tu­tions of Maoist life—and more speci­fi­cally, the in­di­vi­d­u­als who manned them, were the tar­gets of that move­ment.

  Fi­nally, the main thrust of cul­tural rev­olu­tion, es­pe­cially in its ini­tial stages, was dis­man­tling bu­reau­cra­cies that con­trol­led Chi­nese life, whereas most of the thinkers that an­i­mate this mo­ment (say Ibram X Kendi) call for vast ex­ten­sions of ad­minis­tra­tive con­trol over Amer­i­can life, and most of the long-last­ing achieve­ments of the move­ment thus far (say the change in hiring poli­cies adopted by firms like JP Mor­gan and Gold­man Sachs) have been achieved by ad­minis­tra­tive fiat. This move­ment is one big ap­peal to man­age­ment; from the be­gin­ning, the cul­tural rev­olu­tion was about hav­ing teenagers drag man­age­ment out on the street and beat them blue.

  Thus far, there are only cos­metic similar­i­ties be­tween the two mo­ments (non-state ac­tors tak­ing the fore, ide­olog­i­cal fer­vor, at­tacks on pub­lic mon­u­ments) and those similar­i­ties are shared by many, many other move­ments over time, only a few of which led to mass death. Ques­tion the in­ten­tions or the knowl­edge base of any­one who blithely com­pares the two.

Toby Ord: Selected quo­ta­tions on ex­is­ten­tial risk

• Aaron Gertler 5 Aug 2020 5:59 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Litawn_Gan’s comment on: Open and Wel­come Thread: Au­gust 2020

  Hello! It’s good to have you here, as a lurker or a poster. I wish peo­ple used the phrase “san­ity wa­ter­line” more; that may be my fa­vorite part of the old-school CFAR mis­sion (whether or not it’s still rele­vant to their work now).

• Aaron Gertler 5 Aug 2020 5:56 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: Open and Wel­come Thread: Au­gust 2020

  Thanks for in­tro­duc­ing your­self! Re­mem­ber to in­clude this in­for­ma­tion in your ac­tual Fo­rum bio, too :-)

Open and Wel­come Thread: Au­gust 2020

• Aaron Gertler 3 Aug 2020 7:58 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Brendon_Wong’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  We now have a side­bar link to this page.

• Aaron Gertler 3 Aug 2020 7:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jackmalde’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  We have a thread for this! It’s not on the home­page any­more, but peo­ple who track new com­ments will still see what you post there, it will come up in search re­sults, etc.

  It’s pos­si­ble that I should re­sur­face this thread once in a while to col­lect new sug­ges­tions.

• Aaron Gertler 3 Aug 2020 7:50 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Khorton’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  This fea­ture is now live! Any tag page will give you the op­tion to sub­scribe to that tag.

• Aaron Gertler 3 Aug 2020 6:52 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Peo­ple can already add this in­for­ma­tion to their Fo­rum bios if they want to, and I en­courage any­one who hasn’t done this to do so!

  I think link­ing a Fo­rum bio to an EA Hub pro­file might back­fire, in that a Hub pro­file might be more oner­ous to fill out than a quick bio (but maybe get­ting more Hub pro­files would be worth the trade­off?).

• Aaron Gertler 3 Aug 2020 6:43 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Aidan O'Gara’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  When you say “make text black in­stead of a lighter grey,” are you refer­ring to all of the Fo­rum’s light-grey text (e.g. vot­ing but­tons, sec­tion sub­ti­tles), or some­thing more spe­cific?

  I tried to check on the “sans-serif is eas­ier to read” claim but didn’t find con­clu­sive ev­i­dence; check­ing Google Scholar, the first study of com­puter read­abil­ity I saw found that serif fonts were eas­ier to read. (This is just one study, of course, and know­ing that the Fo­rum’s spe­cific body type is tough for some peo­ple re­ally helps us.)

• Aaron Gertler 3 Aug 2020 6:32 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Gregory_Lewis’s comment on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  I’m stop­ping by to men­tion that this is now live: https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​CMy2ueJ9WhZFNyBGs/​​ea-fo­rum-up­date-new-ed­i­tor-and-more