I’m building tools to make sense of the future at Sage. Currently building AI Digest, Fatebook and Quantified Intuitions.
Previously I was doing a PhD in HCI at St Andrews, and worked at Clearer Thinking.
Website: https://binksmith.com
Tweeting, sometimes about EA: https://twitter.com/adambinksmith
it’d be really valuable for more EA-aligned people to goddamn write summaries at all
To get more people to write summaries for long forum posts, we could try adding it to the forum new post submission form? e.g. if the post text is over x words, a small message shows up advising you to add a summary.
Or maybe you’re thinking more of other formats, like Google docs?
Great to see this writeup, thank you!
In the runup to EAG SF I’ve been thinking a bit about travel funding allocation. I thought I could take this opportunity to share two problems and tentative solutions, as I imagine they hold across different conferences (including EAGx Boston).
Thing 1: Uncertainty around how much to apply for
In conversations with other people attending I’ve found that people are often quite uncertain and nervous when working out how much to apply for.
One way to improve this could be to encourage applicants to follow a simple procedure for working out how much funding to apply for. E.g.:
1. Go to Google Flights, and find a typical cost for a return flight on the conference dates. 2. Open Google Maps and find a rough lower bound of hotel prices near the conference venue, and multiply by the number of days you plan to stay. 3. Add £x slack to cover possible price rises and incidental costs.
Thing 2: Slow travel funding approval leading to higher prices
Another experience I’ve had is that the delay in approving travel funding was quite long (>2 weeks). In this period, the prices of flights rose significantly, and accommodation availability dropped, so the cheap options weren’t available any more. Some other attendees I know needed to apply for more funding in response to this, which also took a few days to be approved (in which time prices rose further!)
My guess is that bringing in an extra person to let you respond to funding requests faster might therefore pay for itself. It would also reduce the uncertainty for attendees, which may let them spend less total time on arranging logistics for the conference. In particular, if there is a simple formula/heuristic for travel funding requests, then someone with little prior experience would be able to quickly and easily respond to requests.
I’d be interested to hear if you’ve considered these ideas—I’m sure there are a bunch of extra constraints I’m not aware of, conference planning sounds very complex!
Update: deadline extended to July 22nd!
Thanks Ankush! For this first round, we keep things intentionally short, but if your project progresses to later rounds then there will be plenty of opportunities to share more details.
it is a pdf that I would love to get valued and be shared with the world and anyone who wants to hear about longtermism project
Posting your ideas here on the EA Forum could be a great way to get feedback from other people interested in longtermism!
Thanks Stuart, I’ll DM you to work out the details here!
Maybe something helpful to think about is, what’s your goal?
E.g. maybe:
You want to stay on top of new papers in AI capabilities
You want to feel connected to the AI safety research community
You want to build a network of people in AI research / AI safety research, so that in future you could ask people for advice about a career decision
You want to feel more motivated for your own self study in machine learning
You want to workshop your own ideas around AI, and get rapid feedback from researchers and thinkers
I think for some goals, Twitter is unusually helpful (e.g., workshopping early-stage ideas, building a network). Many other goals, I think you can get a higher fidelity, lower addictiveness path towards, for example staying on top of new AI safety research papers by reading the Alignment Newsletter.
and the answer is “randomista development, animal welfare, extreme pandemic mitigation and AI alignment”
Some people came up with a set of answers, enough of us agree with this set and they’ve been the same answers for long enough that they’re an important part of EA identities
I think some EAs would consider work on other areas like space governance and improving institutional decision-making highly impactful. And some might say that randomista development and animal welfare are less impactful than work on x-risks, even though the community has focussed on them for a long time.
This is exciting! If you’ve got this far in your planning yet, I’d love to hear more about how the journal will be promoted and how you plan for readers to find you? Do you have any examples of “user stories”—stories about the kind of reader you’d hope to attract, how they’d find the journal, and what it might lead them to do subsequently?
It’s also a nice nudge for people to read the books (I remember reading Doing Good Better in a couple of weeks because a friend/organiser had lent it to me and I didn’t want to keep him waiting).
Great to see tools like this that make assumptions clear—I think not only useful as a calculator but as a concrete operalisation of your model of AI risk, which is a good starting point for discussion. Thanks for creating!
Hi Tom! I think this idea of giving based on the signalling value is an interesting one.
One idea—I wonder if you could capture a lot of the signalling value while only moving a small part of your donation budget to non-xrisk causes?
How that would work: when you’re talking to people about your GWWC donations, if you think they’d be more receptive to global health/animal ideas you can tell them about your giving to those charities. And then (if you think they’d be receptive) you can go on to say that ultimately you think the most pressing problems are xrisks, and therefore you allocate most of your donations to building humanity’s capacity to prevent them.
In other words, is the signalling value scale-insensitive (compared to the real-world impact of your donations)?
Quick meta note to say I really enjoyed the length of this post, exploring one idea in enough detail to spark thoughts but high readable. Thank you!
You might be aware of this but for others reading - there’s a calculator to help you work out the value of your time.
I think it’s worth doing once (and repeating when your circumstances change, e.g. new job), then just using that as a general heuristic to make time-money tradeoffs, rather than deliberating every time.
If I was an EA grantmaker, I’d want to start small by maybe hiring an educational-youtube-video personality (like John Green’s “Crash Course”) to make an Effective Altruism series.
I think this is in the works! Kurtzegat got a $2.8m grant from Open Phil.
See also A Happier World and Rational Animations.
Great post, thank you! This is useful as a guide to what to try and add in to intro fellowships, in particular:
There are a lot of real professional people in EA, and those people are influencing things in the real world – EA is by no means just a philosophy discussion club, even if your local EA club is one (and it does not have to be one forever!)
I think this is a really important realisation to have as someone doing an intro fellowship/getting into EA. My guess is that realising this makes it a lot easier to think seriously about making career choices based on ideas/methods from EA.
So, how can we help new people realise this sooner?
A quick brainstorm:
Include some readings/podcasts in intro fellowships where people talk in the first person about their EA-aligned work
Encourage new members to attend EAG(x)
Have talks/Q&As with people currently doing EA-aligned work
Include a few bios of individuals and their stories of getting into this kind of work
Chat to new members about what previous members of your group have gone on to do (if your group is mature enough)
I think it’d be ideal if, people understand that EA is not just a philosophy discussion group, but a thing that they could shape their career around, from when they first learn about it.
Thanks!
Hi! It’s a while since you posted this, I was curious if you did see an effect on fellowship signups as a result?
I agree—and if the multiplier numbers are lower, then some claims are don’t hold, e.g.:
To get more than 50% of her maximum possible impact, Ana must hit every single multiplier.
This doesn’t hold if the set of multipliers includes 1.5x, for example.
Instead we might want to talk about the importance of hitting as many big multipliers as possible. And being willing to spend more effort on these over the smaller (e.g. 1.1x) ones.
(But want to add that I think the post in general is great! Thanks for writing this up!)
I just came across a paper which mentions a loosely related method—pairwise rating for model elicitation. See p13 of this PDF (or ctrl-F for pairwise), might be of interest:
Great results so far!
Could you share the numbers you used to calculate this? I.e. how many hours to organise an event, counterfactual dollars per hour organising/running events, and your estimate for the value per hour of direct work?