Just to give one data point to the contrary: I have just read this and now I am seriously thinking about starting a blog. (I have been thinking about starting a blog for a long time, but this might push me to actually get going on it, I don’t think if the prize were $15,000 that would be the case.)
Aleks_K
While this is true for London + Oxford and (probably?) London + Cambridge, I don’t think this is true for (London +) Oxford + Cambridge, in particular as Oxford and Cambridge are really poorly connected transportwise.
I’m also surprised as it makes quite an important point that hasn’t been made before and I find it’s fair to suggest introducing some minor inconvenience for everyone to avoid major inconvenience (not being able to travel home when planned, etc.) for a non-neglectable number of people.
(FWIW regarding your concrete suggestion: I agree that having to wear masks during lectures seems very low cost. It also seems to be quite low benefits, though, as you’re much more likely to get infected during informal interactions while talking to people than during a lecture.)
Like if 30 EAs are at a party, and their time is conservatively valued at $100/h, the party is already burning >$50/minute, just as another example. Hopefully that time is worth it.
This is probably a bit of an aside, but I don’t think that is a valid way to argue about the value of time for people: It seems quite unlikely to me that instead of going to an EA party those people would actually have done productive work with a value of $100/h. You only have so many hours that you can actually do productive work and the counterfactual of going to this party would more likely be those people going to a (non-EA) party, going for dinner with friends, spending time with family, relaxing, etc than actually doing productive work.
Seems like a great rule. Do you know why they don’t have this rule anymore? (One plausible reason: The larger your community gets the harder such a rule is to implement, which would means this wouldn’t (anymore) be a feasible for the EA community.)
I agree with basically all you are saying here, Max, and thanks a lot for the thoughtful and detailed response to a not very constructive comment.
Just to clarify that it seems the claim that psb777 made on a “UK Effective Altruism charity that [...] withheld £7million+ in reserves” seems to be factually correct. This is likely CEA and looking at their public accounts they definitively have something like that (not sure where the exact 7mn figure comes from) in their unrestricted reserves funds.
I don’t understand why this comment is so heavily downvoted: While the tone of the comment might not be ideal and I don’t agree with many elements of the argument and I also don’t agree with the (implied) conclusion, I think it makes a generally valid point of criticism (that I assume lots of other outside people would share) that the EA community should acknowledge and take seriously rather than ignore.
I think your cost-effectiveness analysis is a little bit misleading: You’re assuming there was a binary choice between spending $0 and having a 5% chance of a seat or spending $13mn and having a 30% chance*. This is not the case, though, as they could have spent anything between those two amounts. It is quite reasonable that spending say $3mn would have led to something between 25-28% chance of winning and spending $10mn probably to something like 29.9%, so the effectiveness of most of the $13mn spent is much lower than you are suggesting.
*I’m much more sceptical than you though that the Metaculus estimate is a reasonable guess: It seems plausible to me that there could be a significant overlap between people highly excited about Flynn and people estimating on this question, which could very well have biased the estimate in Flynn’s favour.
I don’t know anything about the SBF donation to HMP, but it it seems plausible that the HMP support for Flynn could well have been positive had it not led to a large pushback from Latino democrats and BOLD PAC spending for Salinas, so whoever is responsible for getting HMP involved probably didn’t realise that there was a risk that this might happen.
Endorsement by the Democratic congressional leadership. There are plenty of low-information voters who hardly follow politics but generally prefer Democrats to Republicans so in the primary, they are more likely to vote for candidate endorsed by the those people who aim to get a Democratic majority in Congress.
How would this have tax benefits? Also sounds like it creates additional admin work for orgs.
I might be a bit naive here, but I don’t really see how this would violate competition/antitrust law (other than potentially for very specialist roles that basically only exist at EA organisations): Surely the ‘market share’ of EA orgs for most type of role is so small that there shouldn’t be any way this actually interferes with the market?
(Just clarifying: I don’t think it would be a good or practicable idea for EA organisations EA organizations “to offer salaries based on the same formula”, but I’m confused why that wouldn’t be possible if they wanted to.)
Relatedly: it seems like EA has a burnout problem. It also happens to be, as far as I can tell, the first large-scale movement with such a high concentration of utilitarians and people explicitly trying to optimise things. I do not think this is a coincidence, although I’m not sure what the causal chain is. I hope to write on this more in future.
I’m very sceptical about this point. It’s probably true that EA has a ‘burnout problem’, but is burnout in EA professionals really higher than for other ambitious professionals that are excited about their job? My guess would be ‘no’, but would be good to see data on this.
It’s not anonymous, it records the name associated with your google account. (Of course you can just create a google account with a fake name, but then you can also just make an EA forum account with a fake name and post here.)
It previously said: “Your name and profile picture will be shared” (or something like that), but this seems to be fixed now.
I’d assume the bottleneck regarding translations is not to find people that might be able to translate it or organise the translation, but to find a publisher in various countries.
I assume it’s not free because the publisher wouldn’t allow it as they want to earn money.
I am not sure that your assumption that “Longtermists don’t care much about climate change” is true. The main argument you give for this is that EA Funders don’t spend lots of money on climate change. However, this does not imply that they don’t care about it, it only implies that they think the marginal impact of an additional—say - $1mn spent in climate change is (significantly) lower than spending it on some other priority. The amount that is currently spent on climate change per year by non-longtermist/EA organisations is orders of magnitude higher than what is spent on any of their priorities. So even if the funder thinks that the average $1mn currently spent on climate change would be significantly more impactful than the same amount spent on another priority, since someone has already spent this $1mn, this isn’t available to them. They could only spend an additional marginal $1mn on it and they think this is significantly less impactful than spending a marginal $1mn in another area where the low(er) hanging fruits are not yet taken
Yes, but Wikipedia content is published under a license that allows commercial use.
FYI, this has already happened. The version you are linking to is outdated, and the updated version here does no longer contain this statement.