I don’t think spending three or more hours on an EAG application is a good use of time, I’m honestly shocked to hear that anyone spent more than an hour on it. It’s three short questions.
If going to EAG would help you do so much more good that it’s worth working >=3 hours on an application, I would guess you can just write the reason why it’s so valuable and you’ll likely be accepted.
the plant-based meat industry has declined in large part because consumers’ disposable incomes declined (at least in developed countries)
Do you have a source for this? Median real disposable income is growing in the US, as is meat consumption. https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/386374/grocery-store-meat-purchasing people are buying more and more meat as they get richer, even in developed countries
they have other things to do with their workday than write a correction to a comment on the Forum or LessWrong, get it checked by their org’s communications staff, and then follow whatever discussion comes from it.
I think anonymous accounts can help a bit with this. I would encourage people to make an anonymous account if they feel like it would help them quickly share useful information and not have to follow the discussion (while keeping in mind that no account is truly anonymous, and it’s likely that committed people can easily deanonymize it)
I think the problem is that I just don’t have a grand vision of the future I am trying to contribute to.
For what it’s worth, I’m skeptical of approaches that try to design the perfect future from first principles and make it happen. I’m much more optimistic about marginal improvements that try to mitigate specific problems (e.g. eradicating smallpox didn’t cure all illness.)
How much we can help doesn’t depend on how awful or how great the world is, we can save the drowning child whether there’s a billion more that are drowning or a billion more that are thriving. To the drowning child the drowning is just as real, as is our opportunity to help.
If you feel emotionally down and unable to complete projects, I would encourage to try things that work on priors (therapy, exercise, diet, sleep, making sure you have healthy relationships) instead of “EA specific” things.
There are plenty of lives we can help no matter who won the US election and whether factory farming keeps getting worse, their lives are worth it to them, no matter what the future will be.
I haven’t read the whole report and I don’t know anything about development economics, so I might be misinterpreting it, but I was really surprised by:
If I read this table correctly, GiveWell estimates there’s only a 50% chance that they’ll make a >=40% adjustment to GiveDirectly’s main program estimated cost-effectiveness, right after making a 330% adjustment and with many uncertainties still unresolved
Looking at this table and this graph, it seems that GiveDirectly’s program has had increasing marginal cost-effectiveness, instead of diminishing returns, by expanding to Malawi, Rwanda and Mozambique. This is another update against https://www.givedirectly.org/dont-wait/
The 46% reduction in all-cause under 5 mortality seems absurdly high, even the 23% that GiveWell uses after discounting it is way higher than I would have ever thought, and has extremely depressing implications.
Then I’m sure he has stuff in common with Mugwump as well (and with you, me, and Thorstad)
Do you mean Bernie Sanders, Peter Thiel, or “Anonymous Mugwump”? I can’t think of an ideological leaning these three have in common, but I don’t know much about Mugwump
I’ll let readers decide, just adding some reactions at the time for more context:
Honest question, have you read the linked post?
- Build Trump’s wall, because it’s a meaningless symbol that will change nothing, but it’ll make Republicans like me, and it will make Democrats focus all their energy on criticizing that instead of anything substantive I do.
Maybe absurdist humor is not the right description, but it’s very clearly not meant to be a serious post.
I do, reading Thorstad I thought Alexander
Was ignoring that Zuckerberg is indeed using nice pictures to improve his reputation.
Was seriously endorsing Murray for welfare czar.
Reading the original I see that neither is true: the Murray pick was absurdist humor, and the Zuckerberg thing was that good things are good even if Zuckerberg does them.
If some of the quotes from Scott Alexander seem particularly poorly reasoned, I would encourage readers to click through the original source. Some examples:
From Thorstad:
In late 2022, following continued reporting on scandals within the effective altruism movement, Alexander wrote an essay entitled “If the media reported on other movements like it does effective altruism.” Alexander suggested that a variety of ridiculous results would follow, for example:
Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation.
Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation. We need to make it harder for people to be nice to their children, so that the masses don’t keep falling for this ploy.
From Thorstad:
Scott Alexander was once asked whom he would name to various high positions in the US government if Alexander were the president of the United States. A number of Alexander’s picks are troubling, but most to the point, Alexander says that he would appoint Charles Murray as welfare czar. (After listing a few more picks, including Stephen Hsu, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, Alexander says that: “Everything else can be filled by randomly selected black women so that I can brag about how diverse I am.“)
Anonymous asked:
You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that you are now Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president. (Investigation reveals there is another you still practising medicine in Michigan as normal fwiw.) As president, what do you do with the powers available to you? How do Congress, the media, and the public respond? How do you respond back?
My cabinet/related picks:
Attorney General: Preet Bharara
Commerce: Peter Thiel
Defense: James Mattis
State: Tulsi Gabbard
Housing & Urban Development: Matt Yglesias
Homeland Security: Anonymous Mugwump
Health & Human Services: Julia Wise
Transportation/Energy: Elon Musk
Treasury: Satoshi Nakamoto
Education: Eva Moskowitz
Veterans Affairs: David Petraeus
Agriculture: Buck Shlegeris
Labor: Bernie SandersWhite House Chief Of Staff: Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
Head of NIH: Stephen Hsu
Surgeon General: Dr. Chris Ballas
Head of FDA: Alex Tabarrok
Welfare Czar: Charles Murray
Chair of Federal Reserve: Scott Sumner
Budget Director: Holden Karnofsky
Head of CIA: Philip TetlockEverything else can be filled by randomly selected black women so that I can brag about how diverse I am.
First order of business: in addition to being my Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders is now vice president. I don’t care what he does with the position, it’s just so that the Republican Congress knows that if they impeach me, they’re getting a pacifist Jewish socialist as the leader of the free-world.
[...]
There are many (most?) EAs who do not have a direct high-impact career or do a lot of high-impact volunteering. So roughly the other way of having impact is earning to give, and if people can give 10%, I think that should qualify.
I don’t understand the reasoning behind this. The goal shouldn’t be to allow everyone to “have an impact”, and people can definitely “have an impact” by donating 10%, regardless of whether it counts as earning to give.
Emphasising the fraction of salary (rather than an absolute amount)
This seems clearly better as it (1) may stimulate high-earners to give more and (2) also allows for people with a lower earning potential to consider earning to give as a career path.
It’s not as clear to me that this is better.
Since pain is not the unit of effort, it would be better for someone to earn $500,000 and give 10% than for someone to earn $50,000 and give 90%
To motivate higher earners to give more, there could thresholds (you mention $10k and $100k in the post) for different levels of “earning to give”, and the framing could be that the more you’re donating in absolute amounts the more you’re succeeding at Earning to Give. I know a person with a life goal to one day join Farmed Animals Funders, which is only open to people giving $250,000+ annually
It’s not clear to me that (2) is a positive thing, given that EtG would be a less valuable career path for people with a lower earning potential. As far as I know this was a major reason why EtG started being promoted less, at least by some: they were worried that it would cause low-middle-income people to switch to less effective careers, or discourage them from applying to more impactful opportunities
Something that I think is underappreciated about EtG is that it’s often a win-win. Besides giving more money to charity; you earn more money for yourself, gain useful skills, and might have or at least try a more interesting job.
Some things in this spirit that I think are under-recommended to people
Move to a wealthier country / area / city, since that alone accounts for a large part of differences in income. This often has many other benefits in terms of future career opportunities and quality of life.
Try a career in a high-income field for about a year or even less and see how it goes. You might find out that you enjoy it more than your current career, regardless of income. I know a person who switched from a physics PhD to finance and they love it.
Do you still do personal donations? If so, to which charities?
Followup question: in 2017 you used part of your donations to support animal welfare and the long term future, but later stopped doing so, what was the reasoning behind this change?
Another important caveat is that the criticisms you mention are not common from people evaluating the effective altruism framework from the outside when allocating their donations or orienting their careers.
The criticisms you mention come from people who have spent a lot of time in the community, and usually (but not exclusively) from those of us who have been rejected from job applications, denied funding, or had bad social experiences/cultural fit with the social community.
This doesn’t necessarily make them less valid, but seems to be a meaningfully different topic from what this post is about. Someone altruistically deciding how much money to give to which charity is unlikely to be worried about whether they will be seduced into believing that they would be cherished members of a community.
People evaluating effective altruism “from the outside” instead mention things like the paternalism and unintended consequences, that it doesn’t care about biodiversity, that quantification is perilous, that socialism is better, or that capitalism is better.
Note that I do agree with many of your criticisms of the community[1], but I believe it’s important to remember that the vast majority of people evaluating effective altruism are not in the EA social community and don’t care much about it, and we should probably flag our potential bias when criticizing an organization after being denied funding or rejected from it (while still expressing that useful criticism.)
I would also add Ben Kuhn’s “pretending to try” critique from 11 years ago, which I assume shares some points with your unpublished “My experience with a Potemkin Effective Altruism group”
Depending on your goals, I feel like a podcast might not be the most appropriate format for this deep dive on a sensitive topic. One reason is that I would expect many of the most informed people might prefer to only share information anonymously.
It’s possible to work at OpenAI and care about safety without being friends with CEA staff though.
It doesn’t seem that anyone OpenAI besides the EA community is too worried, which to me is a positive update.
EA folks most often single out to express frustration & disappointment about
I’ve never seen anyone express frustration or disappointment about Dustin, except for Habryka. However, Habryka seems to be frustrated with most people who fund anything / do anything that’s not associated with Lightcone and its affiliates, so I don’t know if he should count as expressing frustration at Dustin in particular.
Are you including things like criticizing OP for departing grantees too quickly and for not departing grantees quickly enough, or do you have something else in mind?
I view Dustin and OP as quite separate, especially before Holden’s departure, so that might also explain our different experience.
I would really recommend against spending a lot of time filling in the application. For that to be valuable you would need to believe all the below:
You attending EAG will lead to a lot of good happening, even after considering that:
All the main talks are recorded
People who would accept a 1-1 meeting with you would also reply to an email or message from you
Many people were rejected from EAG and later found no issues working on very impactful projects
There are EAGx and EAGVirtual events which offer similar opportunities, and several EAG conferences every year.
CEA staff will not be able to notice 1. if you spend a short time answering those three questions
CEA staff will be able to notice 1. if you spend a lot of time answering those three questions
If I was CEA staff, I wouldn’t want to miss out on someone that would cause a lot of good by attending, just because they didn’t spend a ton of time goodharting the application form. I’ll let CEA staff confirm or deny this, but I think they even reach out to applicants asking for more information if they can’t make a decision based on the contents of the application.