Aaron Gertler(Aaron L. Gertler)

• Aaron Gertler 5 Aug 2021 0:17 UTC

  2 points

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

  Oy vey, thanks for the notice. Definitely a bug, and one LessWrong is now looking into.

• Aaron Gertler 5 Aug 2021 0:12 UTC

  4 points

  on: Mush­room Thoughts on Ex­is­ten­tial Risk. No Magic.

  Improvements in yield may not ensure food supply longterm.

  Modern agriculture has a large carbon footprint and chemical fertilisers are destroying the health of our soils (at the rate of a fertile area of 30 soccer fields/​minute). Despite a 700-fold increase in the use of pesticides during the second half of the 20th century, yield remains constant but 20-40% of domesticated plants are still lost to pathogens.

  [...]

  From a perspective of a longtermist, this case study is an emblematic story of how we often choose to increase yield in the short-term, in exchange for long-term benefits.

  Do you have one or two sources you’d recommend that make a strong case that crop yields will plausibly decline on any particular timescale? Particularly if those sources also incorporate factors like potential gains from genetic engineering, potential inefficiencies from increased meat production, etc.?

  I see many references to soil health as an ongoing crisis, but I haven’t seen any forecasts about actual outcomes /​ tipping points that stick in my memory. Our World in Data finds gradually increasing yields since mid-century; the trends seem to have flattened a bit recently, but it’s hard to tell how much of that is the end of easy gains from Green Revolution vs. active negative trends beginning to take effect.

  The EA longtermist community is tiny, and it’s easy to imagine even very strong evidence of long-term food supply risk being missed. But even ALLFED, which has a deep focus on related topics, seems to focus almost entirely on risk of crop loss from major disasters rather than ongoing climate change. I’d be interested to know about ALLFED work I’ve missed, or other good resources that people at places like Open Phil should think about.

• Aaron Gertler 4 Aug 2021 23:45 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: President Red’s comment on: (Video) How to be a less crappy person

  My experience talking to people within animal advocacy is that PETA tends to be seen as more embarrassing than effective — a mishmash of campaigns that end up making the animal movement seem gimmicky, without much in the way of clear impact.

  Can a person going with a nice-guy approach really have the same impact as someone being controversial?

  Yes, easily!

  There are lots of human feelings you can successfully reach aside from “anger” or “(eats popcorn)”. Controversial content sometimes sells, but so does other content!

  • An Inconvenient Truth is a movie about graphs, and it was one of the most successful documentaries of all time.

  • People like Hans Rosling and Bill Gates have reached enormous audiences with positive messages about the opportunities we have to improve the world.

  • The most unexpectedly successful EA content ever was a conversation between Sam Harris and Will MacAskill that was deeply sincere and focused on what it means to live a better life (not on scolding people who hadn’t taken steps to donate yet)

  If you want examples of people who’ve done a lot for EA-adjacent areas despite not starting with fame or a big platform, and despite being “agreeable” in their styles, you get Tim Urban, Scott Alexander, and Kelsey Piper, among others. Scott’s essays are occasionally controversial, but his influence among well-known scientists and entrepreneurs seems more closely linked to his more sober, data-driven work. (His “Fear and Loathing at EA Global” is a great example of how to write about EA as a big, revolutionary concept without having to place it in opposition to anything.)

• Aaron Gertler 4 Aug 2021 22:06 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Col­lec­tive in­tel­li­gence as in­fras­truc­ture for re­duc­ing broad ex­is­ten­tial risks

  It’s not clear to me how usable these sorts of findings of collective intelligence are. Are there many cases of them being incorporated by corporations or similar, and experiencing large gains? Have people in the field of collective intelligence themselves used these ideas to have much more intelligence?

  This was my top question after reading the post, as well.

• Aaron Gertler 4 Aug 2021 21:57 UTC

  7 points

  on: Col­lec­tive in­tel­li­gence as in­fras­truc­ture for re­duc­ing broad ex­is­ten­tial risks

  The section I found most interesting was on group performance. I notice that the problems mentioned were mostly pretty small:

  When asking small groups to perform a wide range of tasks, including brainstorming, sudoku, and unscrambling words, the performance on a subset of the tasks gives a good out-of-sample prediction.

  Do you know of any studies where groups were asked to tackle more complex problems or tasks? This is obviously much harder to study, but also seems more relevant to a range of real-world use cases.

  *****

  Many of the most successful collectives in recent history began as startups (small groups of people running an enterprise together). Discussions of these organizations often highlight the intelligence of individual members, and the literature on startup hiring often emphasizes looking for the smartest/​most impressive people. Social perceptiveness gets less attention, but is also harder to see; it’s easier to say “Mark Zuckerberg is smart” than to study a bunch of early Facebook meetings.

  On the one hand, I wonder whether this leads to social perceptiveness being underrated. On the other hand, I wonder whether the greater difficulty of studying work on harder/​larger-scale problems weighs in favor of social perceptiveness — e.g. if perceptiveness matters more for something like “allocating the group’s work between small, simple tasks” than “determining how to approach problems too difficult for any one member to succeed”.

  (I haven’t read the cited studies yet, so maybe these questions would have obvious answers if I did.)

• Aaron Gertler 4 Aug 2021 21:05 UTC

  9 points

  on: Utili­tar­i­anism Sym­bol De­sign Competition

  I see that Wikipedia already has a utilitarian flag created by a philosopher.

  Have you spoken to this person about replacing their flag? It seems like yours would be just as unofficial as theirs, so if they care at all about theirs, we may just end up with dueling flags on Wikipedia. Or are you collaborating with people affiliated with other utilitarian projects, like the team at utilitarianism.net?

• Aaron Gertler 4 Aug 2021 21:02 UTC

  4 points

  on: Utili­tar­i­anism Sym­bol De­sign Competition

  I’m confused about why this has (probably) multiple downvotes, and am interested to hear from downvoters.

  The same thing happened on the longtermist flag thread, but in that case there was an original design people didn’t like. This is just a submission form.

  I like the idea of people running contests on the Forum and didn’t see a problem with this post.

  Did anyone downvote for any of the following reasons?

  1. Utilitarianism is a different thing from EA and I don’t like conflating them

  2. Design/​art posts don’t seem like good Forum content

  3. Contests like this don’t seem like good Forum content

  4. Making official symbols for philosophies seems too tribal /​ identity-driven

  5. I’m confused about who Dan is and why he’s taken charge of the official symbol of utilitarianism

  Or was it something else?

• Aaron Gertler 4 Aug 2021 20:43 UTC

  2 points

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

  It sounds like the “placeholder post” you’re seeing is a draft that should be invisible to you, which indicates a different bug.

  Is the title you’re seeing “Sequence Placeholder Draft”, or something else?

• Aaron Gertler 3 Aug 2021 7:48 UTC

  3 points

  on: Please Wel­come and Con­grat­u­late Our In­com­ing UC Berkeley EA Chap­ter President

  Please give my best to Dylan!

  (I’ve moved this post to “personal blog” because it seems a bit too local to me; I do the same thing with e.g. announcements for small in-person group events with no virtual component.)

• Aaron Gertler 2 Aug 2021 18:17 UTC

  2 points

  on: Effec­tive al­tru­ism quotes

  I love these nature shows. I’ll watch any kind of nature show. And it’s amazing how you can always relate to whatever they’re talking about. You know, like, you’re watching the African dung beetle and you’re going, “Boy, his life is a lot like mine.” And you always root for whichever animal is the star of the show that week. Like, if it’s the antelope, and there’s a lion chasing the antelope, you’ll go, “Run, antelope, run! Use your speed. Get away.” Then next week, it’s the lion and then you’re going, “Get the antelope. Eat him. Bite his ass! Trap him. Don’t let him use his speed.”

  — Jerry Seinfeld

Open Thread: Au­gust 2021

• Aaron Gertler 2 Aug 2021 10:03 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: James Stevenson’s comment on: Open Thread: July 2021

  A belated welcome to the Forum!

  You might be interested in Open Philanthropy’s grants to organizations working on science (a few of the “Thematic Areas” here seem relevant).

  This campaign has also won some support from donors in the community. That page links to some of Let’s Fund’s other work on improving science (not sure how much will be new to you).

• Aaron Gertler 2 Aug 2021 9:29 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: vascoamaralgrilo’s comment on: The Effec­tive Altru­ism Handbook

  At some point, I’d love to have an ebook version certain content from the Handbook. Right now, it’s very much “under construction” (I’m still getting feedback on the content from many people), so that’s not an immediate priority. But perhaps creating a PDF with a few of the most important essays would make sense to do sooner (as we did with the very first edition). Thanks for giving me something to consider!

• Aaron Gertler 2 Aug 2021 9:17 UTC

  3 points

  on: Work­shops to Im­prove In­sti­tu­tional De­ci­sion-Mak­ing in Government

  If you find that some of the people you work with actually apply these lessons in their own work, this may be one of the most exciting active projects in the community! I hope you’ll keep sharing updates on the Forum.

EA Or­ga­ni­za­tion Up­dates: July 2021

• Aaron Gertler 29 Jul 2021 1:57 UTC

  7 points

  on: How to reach out to orgs en masse?

  I agree with Kevin’s comment about creating a post where you explain your experience, and what you want to help with, in more detail. Lots of charity staffers read this website, and many other readers might know of charities they’d want to share your post with.

  People who’ve done this in the past include Simon Panrucker and JSWinchell.

• Aaron Gertler 29 Jul 2021 1:47 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: vaidehi_agarwalla’s comment on: vaidehi_agar­walla’s Shortform

  I think Josh was claiming that 75% was “too low”, as in the total % of unpaid hours being more like 90% or something.

  When I applied to a bunch of jobs, I was paid for ~30 of the ~80 hours I spent (not counting a long CEA work trial — if you include that, it’s more like 80 out of 130 hours). If you average Josh and I, maybe you get back to an average of 75%?

  *****

  This isn’t part of your calculation, but I wonder what fraction of unique applicants to EA jobs have any connection to the EA community beyond applying for one job?

  In my experience trying to hire for one role with ~200 applicants, ~1/​3 of them neither had any connection to EA in their resumes nor provided further information in their applications about what drew them to EA. This doesn’t mean there wasn’t some connection, but a lot of people just seemed to be looking for any job they could find. (The role was more generic than some and required no prior EA experience, so maybe drew a higher fraction of outside applicants.)

  Someone having no other connection to the EA community doesn’t mean we should ignore the value of their time, and the people who apply to the most jobs are likely to have the strongest connections, so this factor may not be too important, but it could bear consideration for a more in-depth analysis.

• Aaron Gertler 29 Jul 2021 1:32 UTC

  4 points

  on: Database dumps of the EA Forum

  We have a GraphQL interface that people can use to scrape Forum data.

  We block web crawlers from the All Posts page so that they don’t click “load more” a thousand times and slow down the site. But you can use your own crawlers on the page if you’re willing to click “Load More” a lot.

  Let me know if you have more questions, and I’ll make sure they get answered (that is, I’ll ask the tech team).

EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for April 2021

• Aaron Gertler 28 Jul 2021 22:56 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: rodeo_flagellum’s comment on: Re­search into peo­ple’s will­ing­ness to change cause *ar­eas*?

  I recommend making this comment into a full post, so that more people will see it and have a chance to share feedback!