Works in politics in DC
AgentMašø
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Should forecasting receive more or less EA funding?
Marcusā points are good
The most impactful charities right now work on existential risks or the long term future (>100 years out).
:) sounds right to me. A couple factors here that might clear things up.
1) I probably want to donate to both GH and AW charities across my life, so I donāt think the results of this donation election counterfactually affected my lifetime donations much.
2) Iām a student and this donation was relatively small compared to future ones I expect to make.
I donated to AMF because it beat the Humane League in our club donation election :(
One of the benefits of patient philanthropy is that it allows you to select the people to receive your money in, say, 50 years.
Assume the poorest people in the world are in Ghana. There is no guarantee that the poorest people in the world will be in Ghana in 50 years. If we want to help people in Ghana in 50 years, your two arguments strike me as quite plausible. However, if we want to help the global poor in 50 years, donating to Ghanans seems much less likely to maximize this.
This seems quite correct! There quite a few open questions in my mind.
1) What is the chance Anthropic EAās either arenāt interested in donating or will spread their donations out across significant time? If they are EA, it seems unlikely that they will struggle to understand the ādonation timingā case.
2) What percent of the IPO do we expect to be donated? To which cause areas?
3) What is our estimate for how logarithmic the utility functions of common EA charities are?
4) Isnāt AI just predicting the next word? Why would Anthropic be able to make any money from this?
Great post!
Seems like a case where marginal thinking strictly dominates the abolitionist case. Iād imagine many more people could get on board with doing more to stop child smoking addiction and reducing the consumption of the most harmful tobacco products.
Iād expect the less controversial interventions to be more tractable and therefore impactful as well. Why not aim at that?
I would like to attest that Andy Masely is himself highly: āWelcoming, professional, knowledgeable, upbeat, and provides āgenerous authorityāā
All downvotes are from EOSP participants
Check this post!
Been to 3 EAGs as a student myself and I strongly agree with this post.
Update: if most of your assets are in stocks or something like that, the easiest thing might be to quickly update your beneficiary information on your account.
This might end up covering enough of your assets such that the will is unnecessary.
Instance of Eliezer X-Risk Communication #47
ā³Imagine there was a grasshopper, and then a bumblebee. And imagine the grasshopper was 120 IQ in grasshopper-normalized intelligence. Then imagine a millionaire sycophant (grown, not built) that the grasshopper trusts pushes a TEN-THOUSAND POUND Diamondoid Bacteria off of a skyscraperāAND EVERYONE DIESā.
Epistemic Status: Joke
In theory, this seems important and worth considering. Another effect that might pull in the opposite direction:
As we learn more about effective causes we are able to identify more effective solutions/āissue areas.
Itās not obvious which effect (or something else) will dominate. One way we might be able to acertain the answer to this is to look at the effectiveness of Givewellās top charities across time. My understanding is this hasnāt moved much, but also that their definitions of ālife savedā has changed across time. Unsure which direction that might affect things.
I donāt think I have a good objection here.
1) You could make an objection about value drift and this should influence you to donate now, but I donāt think this gets to the heart of the issue.
2) If now is the āhinge of historyā, maybe it is a uniquely good time to do longtermist philanthropy.However, if we believe neartermist work is pressing enough to justify funding as well, it seems like patient philanthropy is pretty much a pareto improvemnt over normal neartermist philanthropy.
Would any justification for neartermist philanthropy change this?
Thanks for your support!
Thinking about your āall yearsā question: Last year, our club skewed heavily toward freshmen, as did this year. At Purdue, many upperclassmen donāt really look to join new clubs. For this reason, Iām not too excited about this explanation.
Yes, really uncertain on the poster thing, but itās a good point.
JLDC,
Thank you for your insightful comment.
Below is the breakdown of who filled out our application in the callout for both years. This would notably be the sample of the most interested members. Small sample size and hard to draw conclusions here.
2. Very interesting idea here! Thanks for bringing it up. The only thing is, about 2,000 people heard the pitch, maybe 1,000 of which were freshmen. This means we reached about 10% of the freshman population. I would expect the affect you described to happen, just not sure if it would be of a very high magnitude at all.
3. I agree with this. However, it would be very hard for me to believe that our outreach strongly filtered for interest levels this year, even though it wasnāt substantially different in style than in the past.
Yes good point. Was thinking of this as āhow many potential QUALYs would be lost if your money went to your not-so-EA relativesā. But yes, if you think they would spend the money wisely then this makes sense.
Where can I donate to the Naviation Fund? Iāve never heard of this and canāt find them on the internet.