Experienced quant trader, based in London. Formerly a volunteer at Rethink Priorities, where I did some forecasting research. Interested in most things, donations have been primarily to longtermism, animal welfare and meta causes.
Charles Dillon đ¸
Karma: 1,550
I think a lot of this coordination is implicit rather than explicit, and I donât think itâs very well publicised (and thereâs room for marginal donations to change whether the org gets funded to their high Vs medium target for example, and signalling value that individuals think this is good, so I do not mean to say that this is the only consequence of a donation).
I think there is a misconception hereâwhen it is said that these charities will be fully funded anyway, what that can mean is that they will try to fundraise for a certain budget (perhaps with high/âmedium/âlow targets) and larger donors will often choose to fill the remaining gap in their fundraising late in the fundraising process.
This means you are often not really giving the charity extra on top of their budget, but in practice funging with the largest donors. The largest donors will then often give slightly less to them and give to their next best option instead.
As an individual, you are in this case redirecting funding from an organisation which agree with your priorities to whatever their next best option is.
For example, I personally made some donations to animal welfare charities this year which very likely funged to some extent with the EA Funds animal welfare fund. What that means is that the counterfactual effectiveness of my donation might be equivalent to whatever the last thing they chose to fund was (which I think is probably quite good in expectation).
I think it would follow from this and your radical uncertainty with regard to non long term interventions that you would want to include these donations as positively impactful.
Do you know how they tag the cause area of a given donation?
Is EA community building work considered separately, or included in âcreating a better futureâ?
Suggestion: pre-commit to a ranking method for forecasters. Chuck out questions which go to <5%/â>95% within a week. Take the pairs (question, time) with 10n+ updates within the last m days for some n,m, and no overlap (for questions with overlap pick the time which maximises number of predictions). Take the n best forecasters per your ranking method in the sample and compare them to the full sample and the âwithout themâ sample.
Can you quantify how much work recency weighting is doing here? I could imagine it explaining all (or even more than all) of the effect (e.g. if many âbestâ forecasters have stale predictions relative to the community prediction often).
I expect the population of users will have similar propensity to update on most questions. The biggest reason for updating some questions more often is new facts emerging which cause changes of mind. This is a massive confounder here, since questions with ex ante surprising updates seem harder to predict almost by definition.
Unfortunately notâthe person never followed up and when I asked them a few months later they did not respond.
I donât have many strong opinions on this topic, but one I do have and think should be standard practice is recusing oneself from decisions involving current or former romantic partners.
That means not being involved in hiring processes and grantmaking decisions involving them, and not giving them references without noting the conflict of interest. This is very standard in professional organisations for good reason.
I think the point is well made by Lorenzo, as someone who understands what the linked text is referring to and doesnât need to click on the link. I think it is good that the link is there for those who do not know what he meant or want clarification.
In general I think it is a bad idea to demand more work from people communicating with youâit discourages them from trying to communicate in the first place. This is similar to the trivial inconvenience point itself.
I think there should be much more focus on the question of whether this is actually a positive intervention than just one paragraph noting that you havenât thought about the benefits.
The claim that most smokers donât seem to want to quit seems really important to me, and could reduce the scale of the problem to the effects of secondhand smoke vs net benefits to smokers, which might be better treated with other policies (like indoor smoking bans for example).
Interesting post. I havenât conducted the depth research to verify most of the figures, but I do think the idea that you have a 55% chance of success with a $208k 1 year advocacy campaign pretty implausible and suspect thereâs something dubious going on with the method of estimating P(success) here.
I think an appropriate fact to incorporate which I did not see would be âactual costs of lobbying in the USâ and âfrequency of novel regulations passingâ on which I presume there is quite a bit of data available.
Just a note on Jane Street in particularânobody at Jane Street is making a potentially multi year bet on interest rates with Jane Street money. Thatâs simply not in the category of things that Jane Street trades. If someone at Jane Street wanted to make betting on this a significant part of what they do, theyâd have to leave and go elsewhere and find someone to give them at least hundreds of millions of dollars to make the bet.
A few thoughts, though I wouldnât give them too much weight:
The considerations I can think of look something like:
(1)Sonnen does work with some positive externalities.
(2)Sonnen makes some profit, which either goes to Shell shareholders, net of taxes, or might be used to finance other Shell activities.
(3)Shell might be able do other things with negative externalities and suffer fewer consequences due to positive PR effects from Sonnen.
Since Shell will probably evaluate other projects on their own merit, and can easily borrow money in financial markets, (2) probably doesnât matter, I think. Shell shareholders are basically just the same shareholders as every other big company.
I have not much idea how much good there is in (1) versus bad in (3), mostly because I know little about (1). I would be a bit surprised usually if second order effects were larger than first order effects.
Also, I think a world where Shell wants to invest in clean energy projects is better than one where it doesnât. If those projects do well then that might mean more spending goes to them vs other projects, more because of limited management capacity and better PR rather than not having enough money to do both things.
If there were two otherwise identical options Iâd probably lean towards the non Shell option, but Iâd guess this factor should probably not overwhelm a substantial difference.
I didnât really think it was rude, more a somewhat aggravating tone, which may or may not be a different thing, depending on who you ask. I just took that it was for the sake of not having to litigate the point.
I think banning someone for a pattern of comments like this would be overly heavy handed and reflect badly on the forum, especially when many of Sabsâ comments are fairly productive (I just glanced through recent comments and the majority had positive karma and made decent points IMO).
To be concrete about it, I think a somewhat rude person with good points to make, coming here and giving their perspective, mostly constructively, is something we should want more of rather than less at the current margin. Itâs not like the EA forum is in any short term danger of becoming a haven for trolling and rudeness, and if there are concerns it is heading in that direction at any point it should be possible to course correct.
I agree strongly here re: GWWC. I think it is very odd that they endorse a charity without a clear public explanation of why the charity is effective which could satisfy a mildly skeptical outsider. This is a bar that this clearly does not reach in my opinion. They donât need to have the same evidential requirements as Givewell, but the list of charities they recommend is sufficiently long that they should prefer to have a moderately high bar for charities to make that list.
To admit my priors here: I am very skeptical of Strong Minds effectiveness given the flimsiness of the public evidence, and Peterâs general skeptical prior about cool sounding interventions described below. I think people really want there to be a good âEA approvedâ mental health charity and this means evaluations are frequently much less cautious and careful than they should be.
Your âbest guessâ is that the effect of a deworming treatment on happiness is a sudden benefit followed by a slow decline relative to no treatment? Do you have any theory of action that explains why this would be the case?
Trying to draw conclusions from such a dramatically underpowered study (with regard to this question) strikes me as absurd.
âHowever, maybe a small minority happy to do it would gradually build momentum over time.â This seems possible, but if the goal is to maximise resources, I would be quite surprised if e.g. the number of billionaires willing to give away 99.99%+ of their wealth was even 1/â10th as high as the number willing to give away 90%. Clearly nobody truly needs $100m+, but nonetheless I would be very wary of potentially putting off a Bill Gates (who lives in a $150m house ) due to being too demanding, when 99% of his wealth does approximately 99% as much good as all of it would (maybe even more, as he serves as an example to other billionaires which they might be more likely to follow than if he gave it all away).
This conceptually seems similar to the meat eater problem argument against global health interventions.