Bob Jacobs

Karma: 1,643

I’m a student of moral science at the university of Ghent. I also started and ran EA Ghent from 2020 to 2024, at which point I quit in protest over the Manifest scandal (and the reactionary trend it highlighted). I now no longer consider myself an EA (but I’m still part of GWWC and EAA, and if the rationalists split off I’ll join again).

If you’re interested in philosophy and mechanism design, consider checking out my blog.

I co-started Effectief Geven (Belgian effective giving org), am a volunteer researcher at SatisfIA (AI-safety org) and a volunteer writer at GAIA (Animal welfare org).

Possible conflict of interests: I have never received money from EA, but could plausibly be biased in favor of the organizations I volunteer for.

Bob Jacobs Nov 13, 2022, 8:24 AM
−7 points
2 ∶ 11
on: FTX FAQ
Did SBF definitely do something illegal and/or immoral?
- The vibe I’m reading is “very likely, but not yet certain.”
Given that an insider just wired hundreds of millions of dollars out of FTX and SBF’s private jet just left for Argentina, I think we can at the very very least say that someone in FTX is acting immoral, and it may very well be SBF: video
UPDATE: While there are reports of it being SBF’s jet, others dispute it. It’s a developing story, but for now I will update my prediction from “probably SBF [is acting immoral]” to “it may very well be SBF [is acting immoral]”.
UPDATE 2: Sam Bankman-Fried and two former FTX associates are currently being detained by Bahamian authorities, tried to flee. (The story is still developing and Dubai does have an extradition agreement with the US, so take everything with a grain of salt). If you want to downvote this comment for being down on FTX, fine. But me losing karma on months old writings, hours after posting this just seems like retaliation.
UPDATE 3: New FTX tokens worth about $380 million suddenly appear out of thin air. It seems very clear to me that there are immoral actors at FTX.
UPDATE 4: It looks like SBF admitted to fraud.

Bob Jacobs Nov 12, 2022, 11:37 AM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Make the forum available in other languages. Right now the only option is English.
Also rely less on acronyms. For example, when selecting “program participation” it shows you the acronym VP:
I happen to know that this stands for “Virtual Program” but a newcomer (especially one that isn’t a native English speaker) might not know this (and might even assume it stands for something different like Vice Presidency, Virtual Profile, Video phone-call, Viewpoint, Value proposition etc).

Bob Jacobs May 29, 2022, 11:27 AM
−10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: Propose and vote on potential EA Wiki articles / tags [2022]
For context, here is the discussion:
Pablo
Hi,

Thanks for your contributions to the EA Wiki. This is to let you know that I left a comment here.
Bob Jacobs
Would physical abuse be better? People downvoted me for writing this entry so feel free to change it, I’m not touching it anymore.
Pablo
Sorry about the downvotes. (My guess is that they were meant to signal disapproval of ‘abuse’ as an adequate subject for a Wiki entry rather than express a negative opinion about the article’s quality; FWIW, I didn’t downvote you.)

I guess I still feel that “physical abuse” is too vague. Do you have examples of physical abuse in mind that would be of special interest to EA not already covered elsewhere in the Wiki?
Bob Jacobs
I also don’t think it’s an expression of the article’s quality, I think EAs (or at least it’s forum users) are uncomfortable with abuse. The likes/upvotes of posts and comments that mention it are often polarized and I think that acknowledging that abused happened in the EA-community probably (and understandably) made people defensive. I wasn’t trying to smear EA by including a Kathy Forth post, I was trying to be open and honest.
You could split physical abuse up into things like; Domestic violence, child abuse, workplace aggression, sexual abuse… However, this would make the number of posts for each tag very sparse and many tags can be seen as subsections of other tags, e.g Global health and development ->Global health and wellbeing → Burden of disease ->Medicine → Malaria → Mass distribution of long-lasting insecticide-treated nets ->Against Malaria Foundation
so having a broader tag isn’t really out of the ordinary.
Pablo
Hi,

I think it’s fine to have broad tags that encompass other, more specific tags. My concern about “abuse” isn’t merely that it is broad, but that it doesn’t seem to capture a “natural kind” of special interest to EA: compare with “global health and development”, which despite being broad, it singles out a particularly promising focus area (from a neartermist, human-centric perspective).

Things like “domestic violence”, “child abuse”, etc. are in principle appropriate candidates for a Wiki entry, I think, though whether they are in practice depends on whether these are topics that have attracted sufficient EA attention. There are all sorts of serious issues in the world that the Wiki doesn’t cover, because the EA community hasn’t devoted enough attention to them.
As for abuse within the EA community, perhaps this would warrant a “community health” entry (which we don’t have at the moment). Would you be in favor of creating such an entry?

Bob Jacobs
Don’t you think physical abuse captures a natural kind? If I start asking people on the street to picture physical abuse and picture global health and development, I think that basically everyone will have a clearer picture of what physical abuse entails than global health and development.
I have just proven myself to be bad at writing about sensitive topics, so you should probably ask someone who speaks English as a native language and who is more integrated in the wider EA-community (there are hardly any EA-organizations/projects where I live, so the small group I run is pretty isolated from the larger EA-community). Otherwise the Community experiences / Diversity and inclusion / Criticism of effective altruist organizations might be enough to cover it.
Pablo
Would you be happy for me to post this conversation here? This would allow others to chime in.
Bob Jacobs
Yeah, go right ahead
Bob Jacobs
Hi Pablo,
I saw that some tags now have banners (and icons). Since I made card images and banners for a bunch of sequences, shall I make some for the tags too? I can’t add them via the edit function, so if you want me to add them I would need some other mechanism.
Cheers,
Bob
Pablo
Hi Bob,

I think the image option is available only for “core” tags (which have a white rather than a grey background), although I’m not entirely sure since this was done by the tech team. I believe all the core tags already have images associated with them, but if that isn’t the case, or if you think you can produce better images, it may be worth exploring this further. Would you mind messaging JP Addison, who is leading this? Thanks.
Bob Jacobs
Will do!
Pablo
Hi Bob,

I created a poll to decide what to do about the ‘Abuse’ article and it looks like people are not in favor of keeping it. Just wanted to let you know that I’ll probably delete it if the vote doesn’t substantially change by the end of today.

Thanks again for contributing to the EA Wiki, and I hope this doesn’t dissuade you from contributing more in the future!
Bob Jacobs
The first tag to get nominated for deletion is one which included a criticism of the EA-community? Interesting coincidence.
Pablo
I don’t appreciate the sarcasm. Lots of tags have been deleted in the past. This was the first tag deleted after trying out a democratic process of decision-making, that doesn’t rely on my judgment alone.
Bob Jacobs
The conversation had ended with my argument. No one had refuted it, no one provided a counterargument, no one left a request for the deletion of the tag. It’s also not democratic if some people get more votes than others. If there was any need for a poll at all, it would be about whether the name should be changed to “physical abuse”. Should I just upload the same article but under the name “physical abuse” (but this time without mentioning the EA-community and without adding a post by Kathy Forth)?
Pablo
If you want to nominate an article, you can do so here.
EDIT: Pablo’s response is fair so I will upvote it, I didn’t think of it because most of it was already released and none contained personal info, but I should have asked. I do think the context is important since Pablo’s comment is misleading, the objections were addressed and the deletion process started without request. The fact that my tag proposal stood a day without getting downvoted, but did get a downvote immediately after this comment mentioned the EA-community and Kathy Forth again, is evidence that these factors were indeed what caused the downvote of the original tag. I do think some of the posts I linked in the proposal worked better than others, which is why I used the word ‘potentially’. Currently 48 tags have only 1 article and 55 tags only have 2 articles. I feared that if I only linked a few the tag would be dismissed with the response that the EA-community doesn’t engage with this topic (which is demonstrably not true). Feel free to not include the articles you think are irrelevant, but there are definitely more than two that remain.

Bob Jacobs May 28, 2022, 12:50 PM
−1 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Propose and vote on potential EA Wiki articles / tags [2022]
A physical abuse tag. I’ve already written something that could be used as the article:
The physical abuse tag covers posts that discuss the prevention of physical abuse as a cause area.
For posts about animal abuse see: Animal Welfare
For posts about the abuse of statistics see: Statistical methods
For posts about the effects of abuse see: Pain and suffering and Mental health
Further reading
Macpherson, Michael Colin (1985) The psychology of abuse, R & E Publishers.
McCluskey, Una; Hooper, Carol-Ann (2000) Psychodynamic Perspectives on Abuse: The Cost of Fear, Jessica Kingsley Publishers.
Related entries
Pain and suffering | Mental health
Posts it could potentially apply to:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/C5diBK7sJmoYWdrCs/is-preventing-child-abuse-a-plausible-cause-x
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/o4HX48yMGjCrcRqwC/what-helped-the-voiceless-historical-case-studies
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qv5dRAGkTjxs9vrv9/small-and-vulnerable
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/pW7w5mcbKaWGi9vez/victim-coordination-website
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Xjo23zhn6CPoijLSo/a-love-letter-to-civilian-osint-and-possibilities-as-a-tool
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/nqgE6cR72kyyfwZNL/making-discussions-in-ea-groups-inclusive
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/hYh6jKBsKXH8mWwtc/a-contact-person-for-the-ea-community
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/oXLoevuopqE3hdeis/link-cutting-through-spiritual-colonialism
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/j9toMRy2LAsHfwHN5/improving-local-governance-in-fragile-states-practical-1
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ME4zE34KBSYnt6hGp/new-cause-proposal-international-supply-chain-accountability
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/bqvanr9qz6dg2f5Tw/why-is-the-amount-of-child-porn-growing

Bob Jacobs Mar 6, 2022, 6:45 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Victim Coordination Website
The problem of harassment is what the section ‘Banning, flagging and blocking’ is about. You can substitute the word “malignant actor” with “harasser”. As stated, there are some mechanisms to minimize this, but more suggestions are always appreciated.
The option to self-accuse was pointed out in ‘banning, flagging and blocking’ (“people who pretend to be someone they’re not”) and ‘tagging’ (“Let’s say Barry MacBadguy only assaulted one person and now uses this site to pretend to be his own victim”). The self-accuser can see that someone else accused them, but if the victim opts to stay completely anonymous the self-accuser can’t see who accused them. The flagging and blocking mechanisms are there to punish pretenders, though without a third party verification system pretenders will still get in. Third party verification is possible, but does hamper anonymity and makes the project less scalable.
EDIT: You can’t stay completely anonymous if you use the chatroom to share experiences, but you can stay anonymous if you use it to coordinate actions (e.g. On January 6th 13:00 we post our stories to our facebook pages). Obviously after you’ve come forward you can’t stay completely anonymous, but you can’t do that with any other method either. This project will not completely protect victims, merely improve upon the current situation.

Bob Jacobs Mar 2, 2022, 11:30 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: What are the most important charts, graphs, statistics, or other data visualizations related to effective giving?
Hey Julian, great initiative!
There are some that are focussed more on pollution, such as lead exposure:
Polluted water:
And air pollution:
GWWC uses bednets, medice and healthspan to show how much your donation could do. Some people might like concrete numbers on what they can buy. E.g a 1000 dollar could do:
If you really want to hammer home how much more your donation could do overseas you can show graphs such as:
and:
As much as I think considering new ideas is important, I recommend you don’t include things like the value of potential people and geo-engineering in the graphs, since these concepts may be controversial/distracting for people.
The site informationisbeautiful.net/beautifulnews used to upload beautiful hopeful graphs everyday, and while they have stopped it might be worth checking out their archives.
If you need help with the graphic design of these graphs, feel free to reach out to me.

Bob Jacobs Feb 18, 2022, 12:48 PM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Ideas from network science about EA community building
Hi Vaidehi,
I saw that this sequence didn’t have a banner image yet, and since I made those for other sequences I decided to make one for this sequence too.
As card image you have a network over the United States:
I’m guessing this is a flight network?
In any case, this is a good idea to visualize the idea of sociology and network science. But the colors contain red and purple, while the EA logo is purely blue. And more importantly, this image only depicts the USA, while EA is a global movement.
So I decided to look for images of flight networks that were in the creative commons. I found a flightpath visualizer that depicted the whole world, but didn’t show the borders, just like in your image (which may or may not be a philosophical statement about borders). I began photoshopping the visualizations to include the exact shade of blue the EA logo uses, but that isn’t always aesthetically pleasing. I made a couple of images that you can use as banner and card image, but if you have specific wishes about how you want them to look, or if you have a totally different idea about how you want your card and banner images to look, please let me know and I’ll make one to your liking.
The forum compresses the images, so if you like any of these, let me know and I’ll send you the high quality version of them.
EDIT: I was looking through all the sequences and messaging everyone who’s missing a banner with the offer to make one for them. I saw that your “AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison” sequence doesn’t have one either. You could use your card image as banner, or I can make one for you, if you want.

Bob Jacobs Sep 23, 2021, 10:28 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lizka’s comment on: Utilitarianism Symbol Design Competition
I too would like to know whether this is resolved and who the winner is. Also, I see that since I submitted my entry you’ve edited your post to talk about symbols instead of flags and added the phrase: “Avoid mathematical symbols since these are less suitable for broader outreach”. But I had already submitted my flag with a mathematical symbol on it. Does this mean that my work is now retroactively made ineligible?

Bob Jacobs Aug 13, 2021, 4:34 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Maximizing impact during consulting: building career capital, direct work and more.
Nice post and nice sequence, although I think you forgot to put this post in the sequence itself? I don’t see it in there: forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/LTT73ENYmZRfjMq25

Bob Jacobs Aug 4, 2021, 10:33 AM
19 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Utilitarianism Symbol Design Competition
I already worked on a project like this previously:
Flag utilitarianism
Yellow stands for happiness, that which utilitarianism pursues
White stands for morality, that which utilitarianism is
The symbol is a sigma, since utilitarians care about the sum of all utility
The symbol is also an hourglass, since utilitarians care about the (longterm) future consequences
If you don’t like the rounded design I can also make it more angular:
The size of the symbol, the angles, the proportions of the flags etc can all be changed if you have specific preferences. The main idea is the sigma that also functions as an hourglass.

I do however worry whether it’s wise to make symbols for philosophical ideas. I like designing these things, but you run the risk that these symbols can be used to make people strongly identify themselves with these ideas, instead of them being things that people can dispassionately examine and perhaps reject. I would advise everyone to say things like: “I like utilitarianism” or “I believe in utilitarianism”, instead of “I am a utilitarian”. Let’s make sure ethical ideas don’t become as rigidly polarized as political ideas.
EDIT: If you want to redesign this flag, go right ahead! I’m planning to donate the prize money if I win, so if you improve on my design and also donate the prize money, that would actually make me very happy.

Bob Jacobs Aug 2, 2021, 5:09 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jan-Willem’s comment on: Department Voting
Do you know similar voting methods that worked on a small scale?

I haven’t seen the use of categories and columns before, but the voting systems I used have already seen a bunch of analysis and real world use (the electo-wiki I linked to is a good starting point if you want to look into it). If with “small scale” you mean “you and a bunch of friends need to find a place to eat” I wouldn’t use columns and categories (takes too long), but would instead use a simple Approval Vote. If you have a specific scenario in mind, feel free to message me and maybe I can help you out.
What are the next steps in terms of research / action?
I’m not a professional voting theorist, so I’m going to wait and see if someone finds a flaw in the idea of using columns, categories or departments. If not, I might be able to publish it in a couple years if my university/a journal is interested. I think from an activism perspective we should first focus on introducing a better voting system. Something like Approval Voting would be easier to explain/get the public on board with than this more complex electoral reform. If I run into some people that are passionate about voting reform I will certainly share this idea with them, but for now I don’t really have an audience for it beyond this forum. If you have a project in mind, feel free to message me.

Bob Jacobs Apr 18, 2021, 3:33 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelA🔸’s comment on: Making More Sequences
No problem!
Good question! I asked the mods if they could put Lukas’ name underneath the sequence, since he wrote it. The sequence does show up on the sequences-page, so I’m guessing that when they changed my name they simultaneously removed it from my page, but forgot to subsequently add it to Lukas’ page. That’s just a guess though. Should I message the mods about it?

Bob Jacobs Apr 18, 2021, 9:46 AM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: MichaelA🔸’s comment on: Making More Sequences
Thanks! I actually already made that sequence, you can find it here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/s/R8vKwpMtFQ9kDvkJQ

Bob Jacobs Mar 13, 2021, 7:47 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
Vaidehi_agarwalla and I thought it might be a good idea to have sequences within sequences. For example: Vaidehi created sequences for the ea-survey results per year, because sometimes you want to only look at the survey results for that one year. Other times you want to look at all the survey results. If we add a new survey sequence every year it will clutter up the sequence page, but if you put them in one larger sequence it will take up less space and it will allow people to either read everything in one go, or select the “sub-sequence” they want to read and stop there.

Bob Jacobs Feb 13, 2021, 7:35 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Bob Jacobs’s Shortform
Beauty vs Happiness Thought Experiment

Say a genie were to give you the choice between:
1) Creating a stunningly beautiful world that is uninhabited and won’t influence sentient beings in any way or 2) Not creating it.
In addition, both the genie’s and your memories of this event are immediately erased once you make the choice, so no one knows about this world and you cannot derive happiness from the memory.
Would you choose option one or two?

I would choose option one, because I prefer a more beautiful universe to an uglier one (even if no one experiences it). This forms an argument against classic utilitarianism.
Classic Utilitarianism says that I’m wrong. The choice doesn’t create any happiness, only beauty. This means that, according to classic utilitarianism, I should have no preferences between the two options.

There are several moral theories that do allow you to prefer option one. One of which is preference utilitarianism which states that it’s okay to have preferences that don’t bottom out in happiness. For this reason, I find preference utilitarianism more persuasive than classic utilitarianism.

A possible counterargument would be that the new world isn’t really beautiful since no one experiences it. Here we have a disagreement over whether beauty needs to be experienced to even exist.

A third way of looking at this thought experiment would be through the lens of value uncertainty. Through this lens, it does make sense to pick option one. Even if you have a thousand times more credence in the theory that happiness is the arbiter of value, the fact that no happiness is created either way leaves the door open for your tiny credence that beauty might be the arbiter of value. Value uncertainty suggests that you take the first option, just in case.

Bob Jacobs Feb 3, 2021, 12:47 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Creating A Kickstarter for Coordinated Action
Hey Lumpy, good post and I support the project.
You might be interested to know that these things were already discussed on this platform. I made a post about Making a crowdaction website and gabcoh also wrote a post on this topic. On Less Wrong there is even a whole sequence about this idea.
I don’t have much programming skills, but I might be able to help in other ways (graphic design, mechanism design). I can also bring you in contact with other people that are working on this project like: Ron (co-creator of collaction), DonyChristie (a programmer who already build a prototype website) and gabcoh.

Bob Jacobs Jan 25, 2021, 3:31 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: 80,000 Hours: Where’s the best place to volunteer?
Hey Aaron, great post.
Maybe this isn’t the best place to ask this, but should posts like these be tagged with the 80,000 Hours tag? We’ve discussed the tagging system in my recent post, but I’m still not sure when certain tags should be used. When I look at the 80,000 hours tag, almost all posts are from the 80,000 hours account. But the two bottom ones aren’t. So should this tag to be used exclusively by the 80,000 hours account, or should it be used when people talk about 80,000 hours in general? And is mentioning them/their research in the post enough, or should the post be about 80,000 hours before you can tag it?
Of course, I’m just using 80,000 hours as an example. What I’m really asking is if we should create a tag guideline. Something like the New Tag Guidelines from Less Wrong. (I would be willing to write it if you want)
Also, for a totally unrelated comment. Congratulations on your satisfying karma-score milestone:

Bob Jacobs Jan 24, 2021, 9:53 PM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: Reworking the Tagging System
Oh wow, that’s fantastic! I now feel like the tone of this post seems way too harsh. Seeing that most of my points are already being addressed by the mod-team makes me think I should have reached out to you before posting this. I’ll make it up to you by winning that upcoming tagging event :)
Thank you mod-team, for your continuing work on this amazing site!

Bob Jacobs Dec 25, 2020, 9:36 PM
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Health and happiness research topics—Part 2: The HALY+: Improving preference-based health metrics
Hey Derek, once again a great post!
You might not know this, but the EA forum allows you to store a sequence of posts into an ordered sequence. If you go to https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/sequences you can see all the other sequences. When you click on the button on the right:
you can create your own sequence. Once you click on it you will be asked to write a short introduction and add a banner and card image. I haven’t written any sequences, but as you can see I have designed most of them. I’m sure you can write a good introduction, but if you want a snazzy card image and banner, I’ve made some for you:
Health and happiness research, image card
Health and happiness research, banner
Here’s how it will look among the other sequence cards:
Hope you like them.

Bob Jacobs Dec 16, 2020, 9:17 PM
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab
I don’t think we need a separate tag for this. Especially since there aren’t any posts about J-PAL.

Bob Jacobs

Further reading

Related entries

Beauty vs Happiness Thought Experiment