Hey there~ I’m Austin, currently building https://manifold.markets. Always happy to meet people; reach out at akrolsmir@gmail.com, or find a time on https://calendly.com/austinchen/manifold !
Austin
Would also be willing to contribute $100, for the same reasons! Message me at akrolsmir@gmail.com
I think you’ve left out the most important point: net positive effect of Amazon as having generated trillions of dollars of value for its customers, suppliers, and employees.
Customers gain from having a streamlined reliable online ordering experience, with fast delivery times, large body of reviews, and friendly dispute resolution policies
Suppliers gain access to the huge market of said customers, as well as the infrastructure to deliver products and collect payment
Employees are offered a job opportunity that they may freely choose to leave
This doesn’t even touch upon the huge social value from the websites built on top of their cloud. It’s perhaps hard to appreciate without a background in tech, but briefly: before AWS (Amazon Web Services) and their competitors, every company had to build and manage their own servers, aka physical huge hot computers that require dedicated IT people to oversee and then break when too many people visit your website.
Zvi has a line that goes like “The world’s best charity is Amazon”
Thanks for doing this! I have huge respect for Ben’s blog posts (been telling my coworkers to read the “better video calls” article).
What advice would you two give to someone with a strong product & engineering background, about to transition to their first tech leadership role?
Maybe:
What are common failure cases/traps to avoid?
How much should I be directly coding vs “architecting” vs process management?
How do I approach hiring?
Just generally, what would you have imparted on past-you?
On one hand, basically all the smart EA people I trust seem to be into longtermism; it seems well-argued and I feel a vague obligation to join in too.
On the other, the argument for near-term evidence-based interventions like AMF is what got me (and apparently, the speaker) into EA in the first place. It’s definitely a much easier pitch to friends and family, compared to this really weird meta cause whose impact at the end of the day I still don’t really understand. To me, the ability to explain a concept to a layperson serves as a litmus test to how well I understand the concept myself.
Maybe I’ll stay on this side of the kiddy pool, encouraging spectators to dip their toes in and see what the water is like, while the more epistemologically intrepid go off and navigate the deep oceans...
My rough framing of “why pitch friends and family on donating” is that donating is a credible commitment towards altruism. It’s really easy to get people to say “yeah, helping people is a good idea” but really hard to turn that into something actionable.
Even granting that the long term and thus actual impact of AMF is uncertain, I feel like the transition from “typical altruistic leaning person” to “EA giver” is much more feasible, and sets up “EA giver” to “Longtermist”. Once someone is already donating 10% of their income to one effective charity, it seems easier to make a case like the one OP outlined here.
I guess one thing that would change my mind: do you know people who did jump straight into longtermism?
As an outsider to the field, is there a quick 3-sentence pitch as to why farmed shrimp welfare is specifically important (as opposed to any other farmed animal?) I skimmed through the report for this info but may well have missed it.
My quick read of welfare points is that it’s a per-animal metric—did I get that right? If so I’m somewhat hesitant to equate the wellbeing of one eg cow to one shrimp.
Sadly just missed this—is there a recording? Couldn’t find one on the Youtube page, nor the award website.
“Do you have an intuition around when one should make a Donor-Advised Fund?”
The reason I, personally, opened a DAF was to make it dead simple to donate appreciated stock.
If you’re not familiar: you can give a lot more to charity, at the same cost to you, if you gift stock that’s gone up in price instead of cash. For example, say you bought stock for $1k and has appreciated to $10k. (Lucky you!) If you sold it to donate it to charity, you first have to pay capital gains tax on the $9k, which is 35% or about $3k. So the charity only gets $7k. If instead, you gift the stock directly: you don’t pay taxes, and neither does the charity. Basically, the US Govt matches your donation. Great deal, right?
The catch is: actually gifting stock is really annoying! When I was donating TSLA shares to GiveWell I had to literally fax a piece of paper telling them which shares to take out of my account. A DAF is much simpler; I just click some buttons from my Schwab investment account and the stock lands and gets sold in my Schwab Charitable DAF. There are other great reasons to open a DAF too—but making this tax optimization really easy is why I went for it.
The best fictional description I’ve ever read of utopia is in Worth the Candle’s epilogues—in that it made me feel “yeah, I’d enjoy living there”. Some broad principles:
People choose which kind of heaven they participate in
All physical needs met, no resource constraints
Everything is consent based; there are p-zombies to act out other urges
Highly worth a read!
Hey! It’s great that you’re thinking about how to optimize your donations for taxes (and great that you’re planning to donate so much!)
Some issues I found with your model:Donating $100k doesn’t give you $32k of tax rebate, because the marginal tax rate isn’t 32% the whole time. From $165k of AGI, the marginal tax rate is 24%; so your total rebate looks more like 35*.32+65*.24 ~= $27k of tax rebate. (You kind of mentioned this in the post but I figured it was good to calculate the impact of, in case it was really high)
It’s worth accounting for the fact that without any donations, you could have taken the standard deduction of $13k, which would be worth 13*.32 ~= $4k rebate already. So your total improvement from yearly donating to a DAF is ~= $23k, not $32k.
I set up a prediction market for this bet! https://mantic.markets/AustinChen/will-at-least-75-of-the-usa-covid19
Also, this paragraph from Holden really resonated with me:In an ideal world, we’d be making so many bets like this that our track records would give clear evidence of which of us was a better predictor, overall. But I don’t think that’s going to happen; it’s a lot of work even to nail down a pretty simple, vivid disagreement like this one (and most important disagreements are much harder to reach bets on, and even this one may require a third-party judgment-driven adjustment). I don’t think that whichever of us wins this one bet should gain too much credibility relative to the other.
What kind of tools, sites, or economic structures could enable this ideal world? At Mantic we’re hoping accessible, user-created prediction markets will do the trick, but would love to hear alternative proposals!
In the crypto world, Hedgehog Markets is built around this concept—you stake your money in a tournament, and then bet with their play money; the staked rewards go to the winners, and everyone gets their initial money back.
At https://manifold.markets/ we elected to start with fake internet points, but hope that careful rationing of the fake points can make them valuable the way in-game currencies can become valuable.
One more spinoff of your idea—if the information provided by the prediction market is valuable enough, perhaps the platform could pay out without ever having to take in money, and not qualify as gambling. Eg if the platform sells early access to market data to a hedge fund and distributes the proceeds to its users?
Is there anything about this argument that is unique to fish? That is, you could almost as reasonably ask, “What cattle ranching practices would make you feel comfortable with eating beef?”
I myself am a pescatarian, largely because of an earlier belief that fish don’t feel pain, from https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/12/11/acc-is-eating-meat-a-net-harm/ I no longer hold this belief as strongly, but cutting fish entirely from my diet would feel much more costly in terms of health and taste variety...
In lieu of a liquid real-money market, I started a pair of Manifold markets for:
Create a prediction market in two minutes on Manifold Markets
Yes, I got this feeling as well; I think we’ll aim for more technically interesting posts in the future (e.g. explanation of DPM vs other market mechanisms, observations on asking good prediction market questions)
Glad you think so; thanks for checking us out!
What’s the QALY cost of the sanctions on Russia? How does it compare to the QALY lost in the Ukraine conflict?
My sense of the media narrative has been “Russia/Putin bad, Ukraine good, sanctions good”. But if you step back (a lot) and squint, both direct warfare and economic sanctions share the property of being negative-sum transactions. Has anyone done an order-of-magnitude calculation for the cost of this?
(extremely speculative)
Quick stab: Valuing one QALY at $100k (rough figure for US), Russian GDP was $1.4T; the ruble has lost 30% of its value. If we take that to be a 10% contraction, $140B/$100k = 1.4M QALY lost; if 80 QALY = 1 life, then 17.5k lives lost.
Thank you for taking the time to write this response!
I’m not exactly sure what premise downvoters are reading from my question. To be clear, I think the war is a horrible idea and it’s important to punish defection in a negative-sum way (aka impose sanctions on countries in violation of international laws).
The main point I wanted to entertain was: it’s sad when we have to impose sanctions on countries; lots of people will suffer. In the same way it’s sad when a war is fought, and lots of people suffer. We should be careful not to treat economic punishment as qualitatively different or intrinsically superior to direct violence; its a question of how much net utility different responses produce for the world.
I love this idea! Depending on your situation, it’s possible to get the ability to itemize all by yourself, by saving up your donation amount on certain tax years. For example, Bob could hold on to 10k for two years in a row, then donate 30k all at once, to clear the 12k bar for itemizing. I’ve done something similar when for years when I expect my income to be lower (if I plan to leave a high paying job in a year, then perhaps I could donate extra now and do less next year for the tax advantage).
One downside is that Bob’s marginal tax burden is lower than Alice’s (maybe 25 percent rather than 40 percent), so having Alice donate is still more effective. But this way Bob avoids the need to coordinate with another person. Of course, coordinating could be a benefit in and of itself!