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 šø
Karma: 1,550
Weak disagree but upvotedāI think that Kelsey has played this game enough to know whatās up
āI genuinely thought SBF was comfortable with our interview being published and knew that was going to happen. ā
This is not credible, and anyone who thinks this is credible is engaged in motivated reasoning.
I still think you should have published the interview, but you donāt need to lie about this.
āTypically, this term refers to a rhetorical strategy where the speaker attacks the character, motive, or some other attribute of the person making an argument rather than addressing the substance of the argument itself.ā
Jonas said that Nathan was making overblown claims here and on Twitter. In particular the inclusion of āand on Twitterā points to Nathan as someone engaged in irresponsible conduct, without addressing his substance, and thus meets the definition of an ad hominem IMO.
My second point addresses your point 2. As I said, there are many people who are knowledgeable about crypto on the forum, and this is a very topical post, so a reasonable person should expect the substance to be addressed in the comments. Adding only vague nonspecific criticisms, while I agree it is not zero information, I think it is worse than staying out of it and posting nothing.
Thanks for the response. I still do not think the post made it clear what its objective was, and I donāt think itās really the venue for this kind of discussion.
I think this is an irresponsible ad hominem to be posting without any substance or link to substance whatsoever. There are many EAs who know a lot about crypto and read the forumāif there are substantial criticisms to be made I think you can expect them to make them without this vague insinuation.
Why is this relevant to the EA forum?
Iām pretty sure the answer is no, you canāt, for exactly the same reasons as why it would look dodgy to any regulators.
Additionally, the potential reputational harm to EA from this sort of thing probably should be taken into account.
There are enough sufficiently wealthy EAs that you might well be able to get funding from them if you have a good startup plan, without any reputational risk (and if you canāt then this would be a weak but maybe valuable signal that your plan is not as good as you think).
That is why I left quite large margins for error, one of which you note, the other being that those 6 were only earning 1m+, not donating.
Demand for plant based meat having peaked is evidence against meat consumption declining, not in favour of it. And I donāt think any serious unbiased analysts have suggested that lab grown meat would exceed 10% of global supply by 2040, if it ever becomes viable. See https://āāforum.effectivealtruism.org/āāposts/āā2b9HCjTiFnWM8jkRM/āāforecasts-estimate-limited-cultured-meat-production-through for a much more typical and pessimistic take.
I would guess that you could ballpark the marginal value somewhere around market prices in the US, which a Google search says is $50-75 per visit. Plausibly this is higher in the UK due to shortages brought on by the lack of a market, this is not clear to me.
Does the NHS ever pay to import blood? If so, that number, times the average cost efficiency of the NHS, which I think is approx Ā£20k per year of healthy life, should not be way off, though of course it is oversimplified in numerous ways.
Given the above, I would be a little surprised if any reasonable version of this calculation got an answer substantially higher than 1 quality adjusted life day.
Well done for doing this! I think attempted replications or re-examinations of existing work are under-done in EA and wish more were conducted.
Can you give an example of a point or points in there you found compelling?
That article looks like the usual āutilitarianism is badā stuff (an argument which predates EA by a long time and has seen little progress in recent times) combined with some strong mood affiliation and straightforward misunderstandings of economic thinking to me.
Iāve edited it slightly to work on this, though it is not easy to make this point without appearing slightly callous, I think.
What was this distinct reason? If this was mentioned in the post, I didnāt see it.
If it wasnāt mentioned in the post, it feels disingenuous of you to not mention it and give the impression that you were left in the dark and had to come up with your own list of hypotheses. Itās quite difficult for a third party to come to any conclusions without this piece of information.
Iām a bit confused by all the drive by downvotes of someone sharing a quickly sketched out plausible-sounding idea.
I think weād be better off of we encouraged this sort of thing rather than discouraged it, at least until there actually seems to be a problem with too many half baked novel ideas being postedāif people disagree Iād like to know why.
Very few. The 2020 EA survey had only 6 people earning 1m+, which doesnāt necessarily equate to donating as much. Itās unlikely, I think, that fewer than 5% of such people took the survey given it had 2,000 responses and I doubt think there are more than 10,000 committed EAs, so I think there are likely under 100 such people.
I expect much of the data is out there, because the majority of billionaires either want to give publicly, or they need to disclose when they change their shareholdings in their main source of wealth (in the case of the typical company founder) due to regulations, and donating to charity is seen as a good excuse to do this.
It may be rather difficult to gather though, as I donāt expect there to be a nice centralised source.
62 pages is quite longāI understand then why you wouldnāt put it on the forum.
I really dislike reading PDFs, as I read most non work things on mobile, and on Chrome based web browsers they donāt open in browser tabs, which is where I store everything else I want to read.
I think Iād prefer some web based presentation, ideally with something like one web page per chapter/ā large section. I donāt know if this is representative of others though.
Iām glad you produced this. One thing I found annoying, though, was that you said:
āThe evidence related to each outcome, and how we arrived at these values, are explained further in the respective sections below.ā
But, they werenāt? The report was just partially summarised here, with a link to your website. Why did you choose to do this?
I think a compelling reason for not doing this is mostly that it is past what I would guess the optimal level of demandingness would be for growing the movement. I would expect far fewer high earners would be willing to take on a prescription that they keep nothing above that sort of level than that they donate a substantial fraction.
I for one would find it too demanding, and I think it would be very bad if others like me (for context, I will be donating over 50% of my income this year) bounced off the movement because it seemed too demanding.