Talk to me about cost benefit analysis !
Charlie_Guthmann
Karma: 688
A lot of the advice for young EA’s is reasonably targeted at folks much more impressive than I am, for good reasons I think
Assuming you have, but still probably worth skimming the earn to give sections of 80k/probably good and looking at their job boards.
Hard to say more without knowing your interests and how “mediocre” you are. You can sign up for career coaching with 80k and/or probably good. Also, it could be useful to reach out to other ea students studying math at other universities and talk to them. can query link below by career stage.https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/people-directory?utm_source=ea_hub&utm_medium=website
Are there estimates for the different per animal unit suffering from animal consumption in different countries (holding animal constant)?
because it’s worse to starve to death
The strongest case for Trump is that the Democrat establishment is systematically deceiving the American people (e.g. via the years-long cover-up of Biden’s mental state, strong partisan bias in mainstream media, and extensive censorship campaigns), engaging in lawfare against political opponents (e.g. against Elon and Trump), and generally growing the power of unaccountable bureaucracies over all aspects of life (including bureaucracies which do a lot of harm, like the FDA, FTC, EPA etc).
Bureaucracy point seems potentially reasonable to me, although hard to say if that exactly equates to less/more democratic or just worse domestic situation.
The cover up of bidens mental state is “highly undemocratic”? that would be not in the top 1000 least democratic things trump/republicans have done in the last 8 years.
Need to work through the entire chain of effects here but I think (granted that a wild animal is a moral patient), crushing it for a near instant death is probably just about the least painful way it can die.
Just to be clear a high percentage of them being eaten alive is an update towards their lives being better, not worse.
very interesting thank you
What do people think about posting urban planning/yimby/ local gov policy thoughts on the forum?
I find that stuff really interesting and admittedly don’t believe it is the most important stuff to work on but is “effective altruism” if you have an extremely local moral circle.
only skimmed your post so not sure if helpful but I wrote this a while ago. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zLi3MbMCTtCv9ttyz/formalizing-extinction-risk-reduction-vs-longtermism
Also you might find this helpful
Great work—tangential and sort of a philosophical complaint about these happiness studies, but I worry that for some % of the people getting pinged about how they feel right now, they do include a bit of the “life satisfaction” in what number they choose. I wonder if others have this same worry? I think the life satisfaction stuff is a pretty poor measurement because I think it largely just turns into a measurement of envy and jealousy.
Is suffocating or dissolving in acid worse than dying of starvation or disease?
Lots of discussion about people misinterpreting what barely worth living means on the individual utility axis, which I do think could be part of the issue. I also believe that there is a hidden assumption most people make here: that all the lives barely worth living are “similar” (or alternatively: it’s easier to imagine 10000 people being similar than 10). I think there is another dimension in population utility functions that most people care about—the diversity of the world. It’s easy to imagine the very good lives as a variety of distinct lives and the millions of just barely good lives all being the same sort of potato farmer. If you clarified that all of the barely worth living lives were extremely different, and gave people time to reflect on and believe that it is possible for 1 million lives to be very different, I wonder if many people would feel the conclusion is less repugnant. Whether or not having diversity be an input in your population utility function is a separate question.
Also, I found your post about utility functions to be helpful, thanks.
Probably many people know these and also I wouldn’t say any of them are extremely aligned but since there are no comments.
The various arpa orgs
Congressional budget office
Institute for progress
Market shaping accelerator
Ethical humanist society
Do people here think there is a correct answer to this question?
I feel this. It would be cool if you could drop a post and put a zoom link at the bottom to discuss it in like 24 or 48 hours, that way there can still be a discussion but maybe skirts around some of this obsessive forum checking ego stuff
Re the “EAs should not should” debate about whether we can use the word “should” which pops up occasionally, most recently on the “university groups need fixing”.
My take is that you can use “should/ought” as long as your target audience has sufficiently grappled with meta-ethics and both parties are clear about what ethical system you are using.
“Should” (to an anti-realist) is shorthand for (the best action under X moral framework). I don’t mind it being used in this context (though I agree with ozzies previous shortform on this that it seems unnecessarily binary), but it’s problematic using this word around people you don’t know or non-philosophy heads. It’s completely absurd to tell an 18-year-old or anyone else who doesn’t know what utilitarianism and virtue ethics are that they “should” do anything, and if they believe you, then you tricked them into that view (unless you are a moral realist, which I think is also absurd).
If your target audience does not know what the is-ought problem is, it’s better to stick to output-based cost-benefit and not enter into this “cause agnostic” tier list type thing since inter-output rankings rely on arbitrary metaethical functions that aren’t well-known by most or standardized for quick and reliable reference.
However among my friends, we use should all the time because we know what generally mean (our relatively shared utilitarian-ish meta-ethical worldview), and we feel comfortable clarifying this if it seems to be the crux of the debate. But at this point, should loses all of its emotional oomph and maybe it’s just not worth the hassle to shorthand a 7-word sentence.
I don’t know if they’re doing the ideal thing here, but they are doing way better than I imagined from your comment.
Yep after walking through it in my head plus re- reading the post, doesn’t seem egregious to me.
I think you might have replied on the wrong subthread but a few things.
This is the post I was referring to. At the time of extension, they claim they had ~3k applicants. They also infer that they had way fewer (in quantity or quality) applicants for the fish welfare and tobacco taxation projects but I’m not sure exactly how to interpret their claim.
Did you end up accepting late applicants? Did they replace earlier applicants who would otherwise have been accepted, or increase the total class size? Do you have a guess for the effects of the new participants?
using some pretty crude math + assuming both applicant pools are the same, each additional applicant has ~.7% chance of being one of the 20 best applicants (I think they take 10 or 20). so like 150 applicants to get one replaced. if they had to internalize the costs to the candidates, and lets be conservative and say 20 bucks a candidate, then that would be about 3k per extra candidate replaced.
and this doesn’t included the fact that the returns consistently diminish. and they also have to spend more time reviewing candidates, and even if a candidate is actually better, this doesn’t guarantee they will correctly pick them. you can probably add another couple thousands for these considerations so maybe we go with ~5k?
Then you get into issues of fit vs quality, grabbing better quality candidates might help CE counterfactual value but doesn’t help the EA movement much since your pulling from the talent pool. And lastly it’s sort of unfair to the people who applied on time but that’s hard to quantify.
and I think 20 bucks per candidate is really really conservative. I value my time closer to 50$ an hour than 2$ and I’d bet most people applying would probably say something above 15$.So my very general and crude estimate IMO is they are implicitly saying they value replacing a candidate at 2k-100k, and most likely somewhere between 5-50k. I wonder if we asked them how much they would have to pay for one candidate getting replaced at the time they extended what they would say.
if anyone thinks I missed super obvious considerations or made a mistake lmk.
Hi Peter thanks for the response—I am/was disappointed in myself also.
I assumed RP had thought about this. and I hear what you are saying about the trade-off. I don’t have kids or anything like that and I can’t really relate to struggling to sit down for a few hours straight but I totally believe this is an issue for some applicants and I respect that.
What I am more familiar with is doing school during COVID. My experience left me with a strong impression that even relatively high-integrity people will cheat in this version of the prisoner’s dilemma. Moreover, it will cause them tons of stress and guilt, but they are way less likely to bring it up than someone who is caused issues from having to take the test in one sitting because no one wants to out themselves as a cheater or even thinking about cheating.
I will say in school there is something additionally frustrating or tantalizing about seeing your math tests that usually have a 60% average be in the 90%s and having that confirmation that everyone in your class is cheating but given the people applying are thoughtful and smart they probably would assign this a high probability anyway.
If I had to bet, I would guess a decent chunk of the current employees who took similar tests (>20%) at RP did go over time limits but ofc this is pure speculation on my part. I just do think a significant portion of people will cheat in this situation (10-50%) and given a random split between the cheaters and non-cheaters, the people who cheat are going to have better essays and you are more likely to select them.
(to be clear I’m not saying that even if the above is true that you should definitely time the tests, I could still understand it not being worth it)
I’m not sure either I don’t mean to sound confident. Read the comment below this one about suffering hours