Alex_Barry

Karma: 169

Alex_Barry 8 Nov 2019 16:57 UTC
4 points
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on: Yale Retreat Handover Doc
Thanks for taking the time to write this up and share it Jessica!I just also want to highlight a couple of other resources available for those planning retreats:
- The CEA retreat planning guide (which is more focused on the logistics side of things)
- The EA Cambridge retreat handover doc (which you reference a couple of times, and is a modified version of a document originally written by me a couple of years ago. NB. this was meant as an internal document, so has lots of content written specifically from the EA Cambridge perspective)
- CZEA’s review of their 2018 retreat
Often each doc is written from a fairly specific perspective, so it can be useful to look through a few different ones to get a feel for the different options available.(I think there are also some more floating around, but I am doing a bad job of tracking them down at the moment).

Alex_Barry 5 Dec 2018 2:43 UTC
3 points
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on: Effective Altruism Philippines
Hey Jeffrey,
Great to hear you are interested in starting an EA group! I hope your event today goes well, and apologies for the delayed response. I work on the CEA group team to provide support to EA groups. Here are some of my thoughts for new groups starting out:
It is key that anyone leading a local group has a solid understanding of effective altruism, so that they can answer questions from community members, and avoid potentially giving anyone a misleading impression of EA. This means having a level of knowledge at least equivalent to the EA handbook, or Doing Good Better. If you feel you don’t yet have this level of knowledge, then we recommend you take some time to grow your knowledge now, and start your group later. If you’re not sure, we’re happy to talk with you about what makes sense to do, just get in contact at groups@centreforeffectivealtruism.org.
We have collected together a common set of resources we expect to be of use to many groups in this Google drive folder and there are also resources hosted on the EA Hub as mentioned by Michal.
For guidance on group strategy also see this page on effectivealtruism.org which contains many links to other helpful resources, and for information about getting CEA funding for your group see here.
We also recommend new groups fill out this Google form, to help us at CEA keep track of the groups, and provide you with more personalised support.
Finally to get more regular information about running a group we recommend signing up for the monthly EA groups newsletter, as well as the group organisers’ Facebook group, and the group organisers’ Slack.

Alex_Barry 8 May 2018 13:11 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: The Importance of EA Dedication and Why it Should Be Encouraged
I’m not quite sure what argument you are trying to make with this comment.

I interpreted your original comment as arguing for something like: “Although most of the relevant employees at central coordinator organisations are not sure about the sign of outreach, most EAs think it is likely to be positive, thus it is likely to in fact be positive”.

Where I agree with first two points but not the conclusion, as I think we should consider the staff at the ‘coordinator organizations’ to be the relevant expert class and mostly defer to their judgement.

Its possible you were instead arguing “The increased concern about downside risk has also made it much harder to ‘use up’ your dedication” is not in fact a concern faced by most EAs, since they still think outreach is clearly positive, so this is not a discouraging factor.

I somewhat agree with this point, but based on your response to cafelow I do not think it is very likely to be the point you were trying to make.

Alex_Barry 8 May 2018 9:10 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: The Importance of EA Dedication and Why it Should Be Encouraged
But should we not expect coordinator organizations to be the ones best placed to have considered the issue?

My impression is that they have developed their view over a fairly long time period after a lot of thought and experience.

Alex_Barry 4 May 2018 16:45 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: RandomEA’s comment on: Announcing the Effective Altruism Handbook, 2nd edition

Just to clarify, when I say that my sense is that there are two types of EA, I mean that I sense that there are two types of effective altruism, not that I sense that there are two types of effective altruists.

Ah I see. for some reason I got the other sense from reading your comment, but looking back at it I think that was just a failing of reading comprehension on my part.

I agree that the differences between global poverty and animal welfare are more matters of degree, but I also think they are larger than people seem to expect.

Alex_Barry 3 May 2018 15:52 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: RandomEA’s comment on: Announcing the Effective Altruism Handbook, 2nd edition
I am somewhat confused by the framing of this comment, you start by saying “there are two types of EA” but the points seem to all be about the properties of different causes.

I don’t think there are ‘two kinds’ of EAs in the sense you could easily tell which group people were going to fall into in advance, but that all of your characteristics just follow as practical considerations resulting from how important people find the longtermist view. (But I do think “A longtermist viewpoint leads to very different approach” is correct.)

I’m also not sure how similar the global poverty and farm animal welfare groups actually are. There seem to be significant differences in terms of the quality of evidence used and how established they are as areas. Points 3, 4, 7, 9 and 10 seem to have pretty noticeable differences between global poverty and farm animal welfare.

Alex_Barry 2 May 2018 15:59 UTC
4 points
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on: Announcing the Effective Altruism Handbook, 2nd edition
As far as I can tell none of the links that look like this instead of http://effective-altruism.com work in the pdf version.

Alex_Barry 25 Apr 2018 21:04 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: kbog’s comment on: Please Take the 2018 Effective Altruism Survey!
I also missed it the first time through

Alex_Barry 25 Apr 2018 19:19 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: james’s comment on: Heuristics from Running Harvard and Oxford EA Groups

as people who aren’t actually interested drop out.

This depends on what you mean by ‘drop out’. Only around 10% (~5) of our committee dropped out during last year, although maybe 1/3rd chose not to rejoin the committee this year (and about another 1/3rd are graduating)

2) From my understanding, Cambridge viewed the 1 year roles as a way of being able to ‘lock in’ people to engage with EA for 1 year and create a norm of committee attending events.

This does not ring especially true to me, see my reply to Josh.

Alex_Barry 25 Apr 2018 19:17 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: JoshP’s comment on: Heuristics from Running Harvard and Oxford EA Groups
To jump in as the ex-co-president of EA: Cambridge from last year:

I think the differences mostly come in things which were omitted from this post, as opposed to the explicit points made, which I mostly agree with.

There is a fairly wide distinction between the EA community in Cambridge and the EA: Cam committee, and we don’t try to force people from the former into the latter (although we hope for the reverse!).

I largely view a big formal committee (ours was over 40 people last year) as an addition to the attempts to build a community as outlined in this post. A formal committee in my mind significantly improves the ability to get stuff done vs the ‘conspirators’ approach.

The getting stuff done can then translate to things such as an increased campus presence, and generally a lot more chances to get people into the first stage of the ‘funnel’. Last year we ran around 8 events a week, with several of them aimed at engaging and on-boarding new interested people (Those being hosting 1 or 2 speakers a week, running outreach focused socials, introductionary discussion groups and careers workshops.) This large organisational capacity also let us run ~4 community focused events a week.

I think it is mostly these mechanisms that make the large committee helpful, as opposed to most of the committee members becoming ‘core EAs’ (I think conversion ratio is perhaps ¹⁄₅ or ¹⁄₁₀). There is also some sense in which the above allow us to form a campus presence that helps people hear about us, and I think perhaps makes us more attractive to high-achieving people, although I am pretty uncertain about this.

I think EA: Cam is a significant outlier in terms of EA student groups, and if a group is starting out it probably makes more sense to stick to the kind of advice given in this article. However I think in the long term Community + Big formal committee is probably better than just a community with an informal committee.

Alex_Barry 20 Apr 2018 21:28 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: tylermjohn’s comment on: The person-affecting value of existential risk reduction
I’m surprised by your last point, since the article says:

Although it seems unlikely x-risk reduction is the best buy from the lights of the total view (we should be suspicious if it were), given $13000 per life year compares unfavourably to best global health interventions, it is still a good buy: it compares favourably to marginal cost effectiveness for rich country healthcare spending, for example.

This seems a far cry from the impression you seem to have gotten from the article. In fact your quote of “highly effective” is only used once, in the introduction, as a hypothetical motivation for crunching the numbers. (Since, a-priori, it could have turned out the cost effectiveness was 100 times higher, which would have been very cost effective).

On your first two points, my (admittedly not very justified) impression is the ‘default’ opinons people typically have is that almost all human lives are positive, and that animal lives are extremely unimportant compared to humans. Whilst one can question the truth of these claims, writing an article aimed at the majority seems reasonable.

It might be that actually within EA the average opinion is closer to yours, and in any case I agree the assumptions should have been clearly stated somewhere, along with the fact he is taking the symmetric as opposed to asymmetric view etc.

Alex_Barry 20 Apr 2018 16:08 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause

How could it explain that diabetics lived longer than healthy people?

If all of the sickest diabetics are switched to other drugs, then the only people taking metformin are the ‘healthy diabetics’, and it is possible that the average healthy diabetic lives longer than the average person (who may be healthy or unhealthy).

This would give the observed effective without metformin having any effect on longevity.

Alex_Barry 20 Apr 2018 10:33 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause
I’m not quite sure what this equation is meant to be calculating. If it is meant to be $ per life saved it should be something like:

Direct effects: (price of the experiment)/((probability of success)*(lives saved assuming e.g. 10% adoption))

(Note the division is very important here! You missed it in your comment, but it is not clear at all what you would be estimating without it.)

Your estimate of the indirect costs seems right to me, although in the case of:

growth of food consumption because of higher population

I would probably not include this level of secondary effect, since these people are also economically productive etc. so it being very hard to estimate.

Alex_Barry 19 Apr 2018 15:23 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause
I’m not saying you need to solve the problem, I’m saying you should take the problem into account in your cost calculations, instead of assuming it will be solved.

Alex_Barry 18 Apr 2018 23:35 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause

It probably should be analysed how the bulk price of metformin could be lowered. For example, global supply of vitamin C costs around 1 billion USD a year with 150 kt of bulk powder.

Yes but as I discuss above it needs to be turned into pills and distributed to people, for which a 2 cents per pill cost seems pretty low. If you are arguing for fortification of foods with metformin then presumably we would need to show extraordinary levels of safety, since we would be dosing the entire population at very variable levels.

In general I would find it helpful if you could try and keep your replies in the same comment—this basically seems to be an extension of your other comment about buying metformin in bulk and having it split in two makes it harder to keep track.

Alex_Barry 18 Apr 2018 23:28 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause
Yes, but 10kg of pure Metformin powder is not much good since it needs to be packaged into pills for easy consumption (since its needs to be taken in sub gram doses). Since you are not able to find pills for less than 2 cents (and even those only in India) I think you should not assume a lower price than that without good reason.

Presumably we run into some fundamental price to form, package and ship all the pills? I would be surprised if that could be gotten much below 1p per pill in developed countries. (although around 1p per pill is clearly possible since some painkillers are sold around that level)

Alex_Barry 18 Apr 2018 15:28 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause
I more meant it should be mentioned by the $0.24 figure e.g. something like:

“Under our model the direct cost effectiveness is $0.24 per life saved, but there is also an indirect cost of ~$12,000 per life saved from the cost of the metformin (as we will need to supply everyone with it for $3 trillion, but it will only save 250 million lives).”

Noticeably the indirect figure is actually more expensive than current global poverty charities, so under your model buying people metformin would not be an attractive intervention for EAs. This does not mean it would necessarily not be cost effective to fund the trial to ‘unlock’ the ability for others to buy the drugs, since it might be more efficient than e.g. other developed government use of money, but it does hammer home that the costs of the drugs is very non-negligible.

Alex_Barry 18 Apr 2018 14:54 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause
Even if the cost of Metformin is only 2 cents a day, giving to to 5 billion people every day for 80 years would cost about $3 trillion (0.02*365*80*5*10^9). Whilst the cost would (at least potentially) be distributed across the population, it also seems like something that should be mentioned as a cost of the policy.

Alex_Barry 17 Apr 2018 13:38 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Jeffhe’s comment on: Is Effective Altruism fundamentally flawed?
I was trying to keep the discussions of ‘which kind of pain is morally relevant’ and of your proposed system of giving people a chance to be helped in proportion to their suffering sperate. It might be that they are so intertwined as for this to be unproductive, but I think I would like you to response to my comment about the latter before we discuss it further.

You’re saying that, if we determined “total pain” by my preferred approach, then all possible actions will certainly result in states of affairs in which the total pains are uniformly high with the only difference between the states of affairs being the identity of those who suffers it.

Given that you were initially arguing (with kblog etc.) for this definition of total pain, independent of any other identity considerations, this seems very relevant to that discussion.

Anyways, if literally each possible action I could take would inevitably result in a different person suffering maximal pain (i.e. if A1 and A2 are true), I think I ought to assign an equal chance to each possible action (even though physically speaking I cannot).

But this seems extremely far removed from any day to day intuitions we would have about morality, no? If you flipped a coin to decide whether you should murder each person you met, (a very implementable approximation of this result) I doubt many would find this justified on the basis that someone in the future is going to be suffering much more than them.

I think there is no more absurdity to assigning each possible action an equal chance (assuming A1 and A2 are true) than there is in, say, flipping a coin between saving a million people on one island from being burned alive and saving one other person on another island from being burned alive.

The issue is this also applied to the case of deciding whether to set the island on fire at all

Alex_Barry 17 Apr 2018 13:06 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: turchin’s comment on: [Draft] Fighting Aging as an Effective Altruism Cause
Sure, although I’m not sure how much time I will have to look it over. My email is alexbarry40@gmail.com.