AnonymousTurtle

Karma: 1,002

AnonymousTurtle 18 Jan 2023 11:11 UTC
55 points
16 ∶ 3
on: Doing EA Better
As other comments have noted, a lot of the proposals seem to be bottlenecked by funding and/or people leading them.

I would recommend people interested in these things to strongly consider Earning to Give or fundraising, or even just actually donating much more of their existing income or wealth.
If the 10 authors of this post can find other 10 people sympathetic to their causes, and each donate or fundraise on average 50k/year, they would have $1M/year of funding for causes that they think are even better than the ones currently funded by EA! If they get better results than existing EA funds people and resources would flock to them!
If you think the current funding allocation is bad, the value of extra funding that you would be able to allocate better becomes much higher.
Especially if you want to gather funds for work on climate change, I suspect fundraising would be easier than for any other global cause area. Instead of asking Moskovitz/Openphil for funding, it might be even higher EV to ask Gates, Bezos, or other billionaires. Anecdotically, when I talk to high net worth people about EA (non billionaires), the first comment is almost always “but what about climate change, which clearly is the most important thing to fund?”

I disagree with a lot of of the content and the general vagueness/EA Should of this post, but I appreciate the huge effort that went into it and here I am trying to be constructive. I might write a less constructive comment with all my disagreements at some point if I can think of a way that could inform more consequentially useful criticism.
After reading most of the post, as a person that is in EA to give money/support, and not to get money/support, it’s not clear to me how can I help you.
What links here?
- AnonymousTurtle's comment on [Linkpost] Leif Wenar’s The Deaths of Effective Altruism by Arden Wiese (28 Mar 2024 7:05 UTC; 35 points)

AnonymousTurtle 23 Sep 2022 14:34 UTC
48 points
16 ∶ 4
on: My Personal Story of Rejection from EA Global
Thank you for sharing a very personal story, I think it will lead to even more improvements to the overall process and community health.
As someone that was accepted to EAG with basically no EA accomplishments, I do strongly believe that admissions are not about “worthiness” but about “how much would going to EAG help you or others do the most good”.
Looking at the application, as a random nobody, I personally agree with the CEA decision (even ignoring the fact that they probably have a lot more information).
Not sure about discussing why in a comment, but happy to do it if someone would find it useful.

Edit: I really liked this paragraph
Let’s create a warmer community and be present for one another. There are many out there that have the capacity to listen and appreciate your unique talents. EA is a huge global community with different niches. Don’t leave just because one part of the community couldn’t/wouldn’t accept you.
And the fact that you actually found a solution/improvement (the gather town space) to solve your needs, I wish I had more of this mindset!

AnonymousTurtle 31 Aug 2023 22:03 UTC
41 points
5 ∶ 0
on: Long-Term Future Fund Ask Us Anything (September 2023)
What fraction of the best projects that you currently can’t fund has applied for funding from OpenPhilantropy directly? Reading this it seems that many would qualify.
Why doesn’t OpenPhilantropy fund these hyper-promising projects if, as one grantmaker writes, they are “among the best historical grant opportunities in the time that I have been active as a grantmaker?” OpenPhilantropy writes that LTFF “supported projects we often thought seemed valuable but didn’t encounter ourselves.” But since the chair of the LTFF is now a Senior Program Associate at OpenPhilantropy, I assume that this does not apply to existing funding opportunities.

AnonymousTurtle 16 Dec 2023 1:48 UTC
40 points
20 ∶ 3
in reply to: Habryka’s comment on: Nonlinear’s Evidence: Debunking False and Misleading Claims
I think it’s bad to repeatedly accuse people of things they didn’t do, or having responsibilities they didn’t have, and then write “Oops, sorry!”, and we should do less of this.
You could have easily checked in with them, as with Macaskill last time, so that RP didn’t have to rush in immediately with a correction, since otherwise way fewer people will see the correction than the original claim/accusation (if any). It lowers this forum’s epistemics, wastes people’s time, and stains accused people’s reputation for no reason.
The tradeoff between writing a claim instantly or spending some time to confirm its correctness usually favours the latter. If I were on the board of RP, having my name on this thread could be damaging, and I would feel lucky that it got corrected immediately. I downvoted because I want to see fewer comments like that.

AnonymousTurtle 28 Aug 2023 16:15 UTC
37 points
8 ∶ 11
on: EA Organisations budget size
I think some of these numbers are way off, or at the very least misleading. For example, in your sources you use the budget for Effective Ventures to estimate the budget of CEA, but Effective Ventures includes ~10 public projects https://ev.org/organisations/ (and some less public ones like Wytham Abbey https://www.wythamabbey.org/ that they don’t mention on the website)
I think it’s pretty bad to publish unreliable numbers about organizations without checking with them first

Edit: the post has been edited to remove references to Effective Ventures, but still uses as a source for the $30M claim https://time.com/6204627/effective-altruism-longtermism-william-macaskill-interview/, which is from when CEA was still the name of the umbrella org of all the projects

AnonymousTurtle 28 Mar 2024 7:05 UTC
35 points
10 ∶ 0
in reply to: Arden Wiese’s comment on: [Linkpost] Leif Wenar’s The Deaths of Effective Altruism
In general, I think it’s important to separate EA as in the idea from EA as in “a specific group of people”. You might hate billionaires, MacAskill and GiveWell, but the equal consideration of similar interests can still be an important concept.
Just because you never met them, it doesn’t mean that people like GiveDirectly recipients are not “real, flesh-and-blood human”, who experience joys and sorrows as much as you do, and have a family or friends just as much as you have.
Tucker Carlson when writing a similar critique of effective altruism even used “people” in scare quotes to indicate how sub-human he considers charity beneficiaries to be, just because they happened to be born in a different country and never meet a rich person. Amy Schiller says that people you don’t have a relationship with are just “abstract objects”.
I see EA as going against that, acting on the belief that we are all real people, who don’t matter less if we happen to be born in a low income country with no beaches.
As for your questions:
1. Do folks agree EA’s shortfalls form a pattern & are not one off incidents? (And, if so, what are those shortfalls?)
Yeah folks agree that EA has many shortfalls, to the point that people write about Criticism of Criticism of Criticism. Some people say that EA focuses too much on the data, and ignores non-RCT sources of information and more ambitious change, other people say that it focuses too much on speculative interventions that are not backed by data, based on arbitrary “priors”. Some say that it doesn’t give enough to non-human animals, some say it shouldn’t give anything to non-human animals.
Also, in general anything can call itself “EA”, and some projects that have been associated with “EA” are going to be bad just on base rates.
2. How can we (as individuals or collectively) update or reform / what ought we do differently in light of them?
I’d guess it depends on your goals. I think donating more money is increasingly valuable if you think the existing donors are doing a bad job at it. (Especially if you have the income of a Stanford Professor)
Also, suggestions for individuals

AnonymousTurtle 6 Feb 2023 11:38 UTC
33 points
12 ∶ 4
in reply to: pseudonym’s comment on: [Link] How effective altruists ignored risk
Would you be happy if a CEA staff member had a quick chat with you at EAG, wrote down “IQ 100” based on that conversation on an excel sheet, and this cost you opportunities in the EA space as a result?
Yes. I’m in EA to give money/opportunities, not to get money/opportunities.
Edit: I do think some people (in and outside of EA) overvalue quick chats when hiring, and I’m happy that in EA everyone uses extensive work trials instead of those.

AnonymousTurtle 5 Feb 2023 16:36 UTC

28 points

5 ∶ 0

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AnonymousTurtle 21 Apr 2024 10:41 UTC
27 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AnonymousTurtle’s Quick takes
GiveWell and Open Philanthropy just made a $1.5M grant to Malengo!

Congratulations to @Johannes Haushofer and the whole team, this seems such a promising intervention from a wide variety of views

AnonymousTurtle 18 Jan 2023 23:02 UTC
23 points
8 ∶ 0
in reply to: Dustin Moskovitz’s comment on: The EA community does not own its donors’ money
Thanks so much for sharing your perspective, as the main party involved.^[1] A minor nitpick:
As an example, the top-rated fund at GWWC is the one for Climate Change: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/charities/founders-pledge-climate-change-fund
I think this might be misleading: there are 12 top-rated funds. The Climate Change one is one of the three “Top-rated funds working across multiple cause areas”.
1. ^
  (and thank you for all the good you’re doing)

AnonymousTurtle 17 Nov 2022 10:11 UTC
23 points
14 ∶ 4
on: late entry for the EA criticism contest
This post really does not match my perspective.

Some parts I especially disagree with:
You want to stop malaria on the grounds of maximum impact per dollar spent? Actually, this week the hot thing is criminal justice reform ³ in a first world country—why don’t you go rationalize that cause for us?
I’m really annoyed by this line of reasoning, where once you give 1 dollar to the AMF then you can’t give anything else to any cause area that critics might not like, otherwise you’re killing children.
If Moskovitz was spending it on boats instead it would be seen as ok? Should we criticize everyone that spends 1% of their net worth on something we don’t like? Was criminal justice reform ever recommended to small donors? Was it ever a GiveWell top charity?
This part enrages me:
If you’re curious what kind of press you can buy, consider this fluff profile of SBF by Dylan Matthews. Is Matthews’ conveyance of admiration feigned? I doubt it. Would he have gotten it past his editors if SBF hadn’t donated to his employer? Maybe. Would SBF keep donating to Vox if they didn’t deliver fawning coverage? I’m sure Vox editors wondered this themselves right up to the point where it became clear that there would be no donations forthcoming regardless of what they printed.
Please I encourage people to read the “fluff profile”! Dylan Matthews also literally wrote:
The enmity is particularly pronounced for Bankman-Fried, given the fact that crypto is, let’s be blunt, a completely useless asset class that has serious environmental costs.
(Disclosure: Bankman-Fried’s family foundation, Building a Stronger Future, is funding some of the Future Perfect section at Vox, so let me bite the hand that feeds me and say that I think him buying up Super Bowl ads and Vogue spreads with Gisele Bündchen to encourage ordinary people to put their money into this pile of mathematically complex garbage is … actually morally questionable. Bankman-Fried can do a lot of good with the money FTX produces, but parts of the production process make me increasingly uncomfortable.)
At the top of another article. Is Matthews’ conveyance of enmity and discomfort feigned? I doubt it.
As long as EA is reliant on large and especially on public donors, EA is owned by those donors and will over time evolve to serve them even more than they already do. [...] like everything else, EA will become a skinsuit shambling around and doing everything awful that the old charities do, and have nothing to do with its original goals.
There are thousands of donors in EA, and dozens of organizations doing all sorts of stuff independent stuff! My favorite example is Charity Entrepreneurship, and their incubated charities. They are doing really amazing stuff and are saving thousands of lives, I don’t see them (and all their 20 charities) going away any time soon.
I am literally an economist and I am sorry to report that this is the way of the world. [charities existing to optimize taxes and reputation] [...] But What If No One Will Donate If They Can’t Influence Us, or Generate Flattering Press About Having Donated. And What If No One Cares Anymore When We Talk About This At Parties
Then you will have learned something valuable about the role of charity organizations in the world.
[Sorry for ranting a bit from now on]
This kind of “altruism doesn’t exist” reasoning seems really common and really annoys me. I’m not donating 70% of my income to “optimize taxes” or “manage my reputation”, Giving What We Can just reached 8000 pledgers (I know not all pledgers actually end up giving >10% for their whole lives, but many do!).
SBF is a symptom, not a freak one-off. As long as EA is reliant on large and especially on public donors, EA is owned by those donors and will over time evolve to serve them even more than they already do.
For many people, EA is still a place to decide where to give their money and/or time. Not to get money. Many many EA direct workers are both donating significant amounts and earning significantly less than they would be in the private sector.
”Altruism doesn’t exist” seems especially common in some rationalists and post-rationalists that really cannot imagine someone being in any way altruistic: it’s always all signaling, nothing could ever falsify this.

Personal take: SBF/FTX stole a lot of money from a lot of people, and ruined the reputation of coworkers, families, industries, and politicians. I really think EA is making it all about ourselves in a very egocentric manner, and long-time critics are mostly using it to justify their existing “altruism is bad” or “EA is bad” takes.

AnonymousTurtle 14 Dec 2022 23:53 UTC
22 points
8 ∶ 1
in reply to: Minh Nguyen’s comment on: Wall Street Journal Reporter Looking to Speak to EAs
As far as I understand, almost no-one who participated in the FTX EA fellowship program “crossed paths with Sam Bankman-Fried”

AnonymousTurtle 27 Aug 2023 10:53 UTC
20 points
9 ∶ 0
in reply to: Daniel_Eth’s comment on: How much do EAGs cost (and why)?
I share your concern, but I think it would be more than offset by the competition with EAGx. My understanding from the dashboard, and from personal experience, is that EAGx has roughly the same value as EAG for first-timers (and many/most non first-timers) while being ~3x more cost-efficient. (If you went to both, would you rather pay $2k to go to an EAG or $600 to go to an EAGx as a first timer?)

I think this is good also because EAGx are mostly organized by different community members and national groups staff, so different groups could try different strategies and we could see what works best (e.g. minimize printing, have the many bored idle volunteers record talks with their phones instead of paying thousands per recorded talk, …)
It might also help move EA towards being more of a do-ocracy and less of an “EV-ocracy”.

Another great advantage imho is that people and community builders would be more mindful of other opportunities, or even try to start alternatives to EAGs, that have been crowded out by the current subsidies.

AnonymousTurtle 4 Jul 2023 21:37 UTC
18 points
4 ∶ 0
on: Summary: When should an effective altruist donate? (William MacAskill)
I think it’s really worth highlighting that this Working Paper is from September 2019, I would add it to the title.
- This was pre-chatGPT and the current AI explosion, which greatly impacts the value of donating now vs donating later for people who think there’s a significant chance of risks from AI
- This was pre-FTX, which made many people update on the value of investing in movement growth and on the possibility of sudden changes in funding
- “Giving What We Can estimates that each dollar donated to them eventually results in $100 in donations towards their top charities” references an impact evaluation from 2015. The current link estimates 30$. (Unrelatedly, but importantly, neither estimate is about the value of marginal extra donations)

AnonymousTurtle 2 Apr 2024 2:37 UTC
17 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AnonymousTurtle’s Quick takes
https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/1brg5t3/the_deaths_of_effective_altruism/kx91f5k/ Scott Alexander response to the Leif Wenar article

AnonymousTurtle 5 Feb 2023 15:01 UTC
17 points
2 ∶ 0
on: EA’s weirdness makes it unusually susceptible to bad behavior
Potentially relevant posts: On “fringe” ideas and https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/10/23/kolmogorov-complicity-and-the-parable-of-lightning/

AnonymousTurtle 26 Jan 2023 1:17 UTC
17 points
6 ∶ 1
in reply to: lukeprog’s comment on: When Did EA Start?
MacAskill was definitely a longtermist in 2012. But I don’t think he mentioned it in Doing Good Better, or any of the more public/introductory narrative around EA.

I think the “pivot to longermism” narrative is a reaction to a change in communication strategy (80000 hours becoming explicitly longtermist, EA intro materials becoming mostly longtermist). I think critics see it as a “sharp left turn” in the AI Alignment sense, where the longtermist values were there all along but were much more dormant while EA was less powerful.

There’s a previous discussion here

AnonymousTurtle 19 Nov 2022 15:43 UTC
16 points
7 ∶ 4
in reply to: Wei Dai’s comment on: My takes on the FTX situation will (mostly) be cold, not hot
An important difference is that OpenAI has been distancing itself from EA after the Anthropic split

AnonymousTurtle 7 Feb 2023 12:41 UTC
15 points
6 ∶ 1
in reply to: Duncan Sabien’s comment on: The number of burner accounts is too damn high
If you have time to have a look at my post and recent comments, would you say that this account creeps you out, or only the more EA-critical ones?
The alternative is not really to post these things under my real name, but not to post at all (for various reasons: don’t want the pro-EA posts to be seen as virtue signaling, don’t want to be canceled in 26 years for whatever will be cancelable then, don’t want my friends to get secondhand reputation damage)

AnonymousTurtle 8 Sep 2023 14:18 UTC
14 points
5 ∶ 0
on: AMA: 80,000 Hours Career Advising Team
Do you have approximate statistics on the percentage distribution of paths you most commonly recommend during your 1-1 calls? In particular AI Safety related vs anything else, and in AI Safety working at top labs vs policy vs theoretical research. For example: “we recommend 1% of people in our calls to consider work in something climate-related, 50% consider work in AI Safety at OpenAI/other top labs, 50% to consider work in AI-policy, 20% to consider work in biosecurity, 30% in EA meta, 5% in earning to give, …”
I ask because I heard the meme that “80,000hours calls are not worth the time, they just tell everyone to go into AI safety”. I think it’s not true, but I would like to have some data to refute it.