Ben_West

• Ben_West 10 Jul 2019 22:39 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: SoerenMind's comment on: My recom­men­da­tions for RSI treatment

  Is there a non pay­wall ver­sion or a sum­mary you could share? I’m guess­ing this is the tool you are talk­ing about? https://​​www.ama­zon.com/​​Ther­aBand-Ten­donitis-Strength-Re­sis­tance-Ten­dini­tis/​​dp/​​B07NX7JXXH

• Ben_West 8 Jul 2019 14:58 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: Ways Fru­gal­ity In­creases Productivity

  That sounds right to me

• Ben_West 8 Jul 2019 14:55 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: KathrynMecrow's comment on: Ways Fru­gal­ity In­creases Productivity

  Thanks for the clar­ifi­ca­tion! I agree that there are lots of ways that spend­ing money on your­self can make you more pro­duc­tive, and a gym mem­ber­ship seems plau­si­bly like one of those for you. I’m just point­ing out that not all ways of spend­ing money on your­self im­prove your pro­duc­tivity (which is a claim you might not en­dorse, but seems to have got­ten some trac­tion in EA).

• Ben_West 26 Jun 2019 17:37 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Davis_Kingsley's comment on: Ways Fru­gal­ity In­creases Productivity

  This is great. Much more elo­quent than my post.

• Ben_West 26 Jun 2019 17:36 UTC

  33 points

  in reply to: Khorton's comment on: Ways Fru­gal­ity In­creases Productivity

  Ar­gu­ments 2 and 3 mostly seem like ar­gu­ments against hav­ing a life out­side of work—am I read­ing that right?

  
  Yes, if you want to main­tain flex­i­bil­ity to jump on new pro­jects if ex­cit­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties arise, you prob­a­bly shouldn’t have much of a life out­side of work.
  
  (Note: I per­son­ally do have a fairly in­volved life out­side of work, and am fine with that trade-off. I’m just push­ing back against the claim that no trade-off ex­ists.)
  

Ways Fru­gal­ity In­creases Productivity

• Ben_West 24 Jun 2019 23:32 UTC

  19 points

  on: In­for­ma­tion se­cu­rity ca­reers for GCR reduction

  Thanks Claire and Luke for writ­ing this!
  
  I have hired se­cu­rity con­sul­tants a cou­ple of times, and found that it was challeng­ing, but within the nor­mal limits of how challeng­ing hiring always is. If you want some­one to tell you the best prac­tices for en­crypt­ing AWS servers, or even how to pro­tect some un­usual con­figu­ra­tion of AWS ser­vices, my guess is that you can prob­a­bly find some­one (al­though maybe you will be pay­ing them $200+/​hour).
  
  My as­sump­tion is that the challenge you are point­ing to is more about find­ing peo­ple who can e.g. come up with novel cryp­to­graphic meth­ods or trans­late game the­o­retic in­ter­na­tional re­la­tions re­sults into se­cu­rity pro­to­cols, which seems differ­ent from (and sub­stan­tially harder than) the work that most “in­for­ma­tion se­cu­rity” peo­ple do.
  
  Is that ac­cu­rate? The way you de­scribed this as a “sel­ler’s mar­ket” etc. makes me un­sure if you think it’s challeng­ing to find even “nor­mal”/​ju­nior info sec staff.

• Ben_West 21 Jun 2019 21:39 UTC

  8 points

  on: How bad would nu­clear win­ter caused by a US-Rus­sia nu­clear ex­change be?

  Thanks for writ­ing this up! I’m re­ally ex­cited to see such a de­tailed model of nu­clear win­ter risk. As Kit men­tioned, the guessti­mate model is easy to un­der­stand and play with.

• Ben_West 30 May 2019 19:50 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III's comment on: Drown­ing chil­dren are rare

  I’d be very in­ter­ested to know if there are posts that both crit­i­cize some­thing EA in a co­gent way as this post does and don’t re­ceive large num­bers of down­votes.

  Hal­lstead’s crit­i­cism of ACE seems like one ex­am­ple.
  

• Ben_West 30 May 2019 15:52 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: G Gordon Worley III's comment on: Drown­ing chil­dren are rare

  Most of the com­ments in the EA fo­rum are point­ing out se­ri­ous fac­tual er­rors in the post (or link­ing to such ex­pla­na­tions). The LW com­ments are more pos­i­tive. The sim­pler ex­pla­na­tion to me seems like the is­sues with his posts were hard-to-find, and un­sur­pris­ingly peo­ple on the EA fo­rum are bet­ter at find­ing them be­cause they have thought more about EA.

• Ben_West 30 May 2019 15:35 UTC

  29 points

  on: EA Meta Fund Grants—March 2019

  Thanks for writ­ing this up!
  
  Ques­tion about One for the World: the av­er­age Amer­i­can donates about 4% of their in­come to char­ity. Given this, ask­ing peo­ple to pledge 1% seems a bit odd – al­most like you are ask­ing them to de­crease the amount they donate.
  
  One benefit of OFTW is that they are push­ing GiveWell-recom­mended char­i­ties, but this seems di­rectly com­pet­i­tive with TLYCS, which gen­er­ally sug­gests peo­ple pledge 2-5% (the scale ad­justs based on your in­come).
  
  It’s also some­what com­pet­i­tive with the Giv­ing What We Can pledge, which is a cause-neu­tral 10%.
  
  I’m cu­ri­ous what you see as the benefits of OFTW over these al­ter­na­tives?

• Ben_West 22 May 2019 22:18 UTC

  13 points

  on: In­gre­di­ents for cre­at­ing dis­rup­tive re­search teams

  Thanks so much for writ­ing this! It looks like a re­ally thor­ough in­ves­ti­ga­tion, and you found more con­crete sug­ges­tions than I would’ve ex­pected.
  
  Re­gard­ing psy­cholog­i­cal safety: Google also found that psy­cholog­i­cal safety was the strongest pre­dic­tor of suc­cess on their teams, and has cre­ated some re­sources to help foster it which you might be in­ter­ested in.

• Ben_West 15 May 2019 16:07 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Jon_Behar's comment on: A Frame­work for Think­ing about the EA La­bor Market

  Cool. I think that is a helpful seg­men­ta­tion.
  
  But are you say­ing a) there are lots of peo­ple in co­hort 2 who are great can­di­dates so we should go af­ter them, or b) there are not very many peo­ple in co­hort 2, but be­cause they are from some un­der­rep­re­sented de­mo­graphic we should still go af­ter them?

• Ben_West 14 May 2019 15:34 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Jon_Behar's comment on: A Frame­work for Think­ing about the EA La­bor Market

  I think the EA com­mu­nity has got­ten caught up in the ob­ser­va­tion that “there are a lot of smart peo­ple will­ing to work for way be­low mar­ket” and lost track of the ques­tion of “what’s the right way to struc­ture EA com­pen­sa­tion to max­i­mize im­pact?”

  Not sure I fully un­der­stand this. You’re say­ing some­thing like: “it might be true that in­creas­ing wages will have only a small in­crease in the num­ber of can­di­dates, but those new can­di­dates are un­usu­ally im­pact­ful (be­cause they are from un­der­rep­re­sented groups) so it’s still worth do­ing?”

• Ben_West 13 May 2019 23:30 UTC

  8 points

  on: A Frame­work for Think­ing about the EA La­bor Market

  Thanks for writ­ing this Jon!

  “But I be­lieve many EAs are re­sis­tant to rais­ing salaries as a way to close tal­ent gaps be­cause they con­flate will­ing­ness to work for low pay with fit for a job”
  
  The claim I have heard most fre­quently is not this but rather that la­bor sup­ply is in­elas­tic be­low mar­ket rates. E.g. there are peo­ple who re­ally want to work for you (be­cause of your mis­sion or the pres­tige or what­ever), and to them be­ing paid 60% mar­ket rate is ba­si­cally the same as be­ing paid 90% mar­ket rate. So rais­ing your com­pen­sa­tion from 60% to 90% mar­ket rate won’t ac­tu­ally at­tract more can­di­dates.
  
  (I mod­ified your pic­ture here to show this – you can see that the quan­tity sup­plied Qs is very close to the equil­ibrium quan­tity sup­plied Qs*.)
  
  I don’t know if this is ac­tu­ally true (it seems sim­plis­tic, at the least), but it seems con­sis­tent with ev­ery­thing you’ve writ­ten above yet still doesn’t im­ply EA or­ga­ni­za­tions should fo­cus on rais­ing salaries.

• Ben_West 13 May 2019 22:57 UTC

  5 points

  on: Non-Profit In­surance Agency

  Thanks for con­sid­er­ing this! I be­lieve you are con­sid­er­ing what I would call “earn­ing to give” as an in­surance agent. 80 K has more info on earn­ing to give, if you have not already seen that: https://​​80000hours.org/​​ar­ti­cles/​​earn­ing-to-give/​​
  
  Build­ing on Gor­don’s an­swer: LLCs are pass-through en­tities, which means that you can deduct dona­tions up to half your rev­enue/​in­come. You could con­sider some­thing more elab­o­rate (e.g. a cor­po­ra­tion owned by a non­profit foun­da­tion, like New­man’s Own), but that’s prob­a­bly un­nec­es­sar­ily com­plex.

• Ben_West 4 May 2019 17:36 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: AviNorowitz's comment on: What is the Im­pact of Beyond Meat?

  I didn’t re­al­ize they had dis­con­tinued the chicken prod­ucts. That’s too bad

[Question] What is the Im­pact of Beyond Meat?

• Ben_West 18 Apr 2019 18:25 UTC

  10 points

  on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  Weaker ev­i­dence shows that psychedelic ex­pe­riences pos­i­tively pre­dict liberal and anti-au­thor­i­tar­ian poli­ti­cal views, trait open­ness

  In­creas­ing open­ness does not seem uniformly good, e.g. SSC wrote a spec­u­la­tive blog post that psychedelic use may make one “open” to pseu­do­science, con­spir­acy the­o­ries etc. I’m cu­ri­ous if you have thoughts on this?

• Ben_West 19 Mar 2019 18:12 UTC

  7 points

  on: Con­cept: EA Donor List. To en­able EAs that are start­ing new pro­jects to find seed donors, es­pe­cially for peo­ple that aren’t well connected

  Thanks for think­ing of this! My ex­pe­rience is that, in both for-profit and non­profit spaces, the limit­ing con­straint is not knowl­edge that fund­able pro­jects ex­ist. Rather, it’s the lack of due dili­gence on the pro­jects (and peo­ple who can do that sort of DD).
  
  In for-profit an­gel in­vest­ing, usu­ally one in­vestor will take the “lead”, mean­ing that they do a full ex­am­i­na­tion of the startup: speak with cus­tomers, au­dit the fi­nan­cials, do back­ground checks on the founders, etc. Other in­vestors will in­vest con­di­tional on the lead sign­ing off. Cer­tain groups will usu­ally pre­fer to lead or not; some of them will make in­vest­ments into hiring lawyers, ac­coun­tants etc. to help them do this due dili­gence, whereas oth­ers will pre­fer to just defer to other lead in­vestors.
  
  I’m not aware of any en­tity similar to a lead in­vestor in the EA com­mu­nity. Peo­ple some­times sug­gest just fol­low­ing on with OpenPhil (i.e. only donat­ing to or­ga­ni­za­tions which OpenPhil grants to) – this doesn’t seem un­rea­son­able, but it does mean that many or­ga­ni­za­tions will be left un­funded.