Cienna

Karma: 266

Evaluating a crowdfunding campaign to test an oral anthrax vaccine for wildlife

Cienna12 Oct 2020 5:06 UTC

33 points

3 comments4 min readEA link

Cienna 13 Oct 2020 1:59 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: Evaluating a crowdfunding campaign to test an oral anthrax vaccine for wildlife
Thank you!

Cienna 25 Oct 2020 16:00 UTC
1 point
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on: Evaluating a crowdfunding campaign to test an oral anthrax vaccine for wildlife
Update: I now think it’s a problem with the first impression. A title with shorter words that stirred the imagination might perform better. I remember feeling the draw of effort to understand what the title meant.
Compared with
“Growing edible algae on the Moon”
- title was partly misleading
- raise was overfunded with plenty of time to spare
- Might have been “Assessing fresh spirulina as a space food at HI-SEAS”
“What is the ethanol resistance of lignin biocoating?”
- accurate title
- raise failed at ¹⁄₃
- Might have been “Can lignin keep cardboard from getting soggy when I soak it in beer?”
If too many syllables and not enough imagery in the first impression is why the raise failed to gather interest, then I made the same mistake when titling this post! Maybe it should have been “Why isn’t this project to vaccinate deer against anthrax getting funded?”

Cienna 18 Nov 2020 1:03 UTC
3 points
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on: Why those who care about catastrophic and existential risk should care about autonomous weapons
Thank you so much for writing this! What sources would you recommend for keeping up with further developments in this area?

Cienna 28 Nov 2020 4:24 UTC
7 points
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on: Competitive Ethics
Thanks for the fascinating post! This inspired me to arrange a discussion with some philosophical Meetup friends who have had similar thoughts in this direction. Anyone interested is welcome to join the conversation! It will be Sunday, November 29th at 7 PM ET.

Call link: https://meet.google.com/pck-hiva-oen

Meetup description: https://meetu.ps/e/JzK78/wGLs9/a

Cienna 29 Nov 2020 19:18 UTC
5 points
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on: Opportunity to increase EA org funding by ~$200K/year if a couple hundred EAs take 1 minute on Giving Tuesday
I like it! Good job finding a small one-time change that would add up to a big difference over time.

Visa, PayPal, and some others already have discounted credit card processing rates for charities. How do you plan to respond to a boilerplate reply saying they’re already providing a discount for charities? I’m concerned that the existing nominal discount will “check the box” for some people that the credit card processing companies “care”.

Do you have a plan for negotiating if you get an interested response? In my limited experience with vendor pricing negotiations at work, counterparties are usually more amenable to a narrowly limited ask that demonstrates you understand the value they are providing. “Can I get a discount on the oversize box fee?” or “Can I get a discount on these 7 standard items?” are easier to say yes to than changing a whole category multiplier, where they would have to actually do the math.

This might look like asking for
- transaction fees to be waived on only Giving Tuesday
- a specific, deeper discount that still covers their expenses for providing the service
- a fee rebate program that could be. implemented separately from their payment processing
Also, if you target multiple processors, you might be able to play them against each other.

Good luck!

Cienna 30 Nov 2020 2:14 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Cienna’s comment on: Competitive Ethics
The call has now concluded. 8 participants, 2 hours, one great topic. Thank you again, mwcvitkovic!

Cienna 8 Dec 2020 21:03 UTC
13 points
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on: Idea: “Change the World University”
How would you separate the genuine idealists from the virtue signalers?

Cienna 10 Dec 2020 11:22 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: capybaralet’s comment on: Idea: “Change the World University”
Hmm. I apologize, I don’t actually know whether idealists and virtue signalers differ in productivity. I think the motivation matters for what someone will put up with on the way to their goals; maybe some problems are easier for virtue signalers to solve.

Cienna 10 Dec 2020 11:54 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: capybaralet’s comment on: Idea: “Change the World University”
I think there’s another source of jadedness: things being made unnecessarily difficult. I was explicitly told in school by instructors, “we’re going to make this harder than it needs to be, in arbitrary ways, because real life is like that sometimes, and you need to figure out how to handle it psychologically. Better that you learn to deal with pointless assignments and needlessly difficult problems and petty teammates and vague instructions now than in a job.” Being forewarned made it bearable, I was even grateful for it. And then I forgot this when I changed schools, the new place provided the same kind of challenges but didn’t say so explicitly, and I got frustrated and hurt by the work being unnecessarily difficult.

I think some who aren’t warned correctly intuit that someone is deliberately making life harder than it needs to be, and conclude the deck is being stacked against them, instead of concluding this adversity is being created to give them opportunities to learn mental strategies for not getting jaded.

Cienna 10 Jan 2021 12:53 UTC
3 points
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on: Introducing a project on accountability in governance, plus a call for volunteers
Another type of related existing project is government-side community engagement tools, such as https://publicinput.com/. Their software makes it easier for city governments to ask questions and seek feedback from their residents. I know Jay started out with the goal of trying to get elected representatives in direct conversational contact with their constituents, and I think it’d be worth asking him why he went this direction instead.

Cienna 4 Feb 2021 1:19 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: Trying to help coral reefs survive climate change seems incredibly neglected.
A brief answer from NOAA: “Coral reefs provide coastal protection for communities, habitat for fish, and millions of dollars in recreation and tourism, among other benefits.” Like jetties and quays, reefs dissipate wave energy, lessening the impact of storms on the shore and coastal investments. Young and small fish can hide from larger fish in the nooks and crevices of reefs, helping more of them to reach adulthood and build up fishery stock.

Reef Resilience has additional numbers and citations under the “Economic Value” tab if you’re curious!

Cienna 4 Feb 2021 1:36 UTC
2 points
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on: Trying to help coral reefs survive climate change seems incredibly neglected.
RE “Are there still people to fund… in this space?”
https://experiment.com/projects/joining-efforts-of-local-actors-to-imporove-marine-monitoring-program-of-coral-communities
Here’s a small one! This Experiment.com crowdfunding project is open until 2/18. An existing reef health monitoring program seeks supplemental funding to train volunteer divers from Adventure Scientists so they can expand their area.

This may be a good opportunity to ask professionals in the area about challenges to their work, since they’ll already be expecting to answer questions publicly in the discussion section of the raise. In my limited experience, researchers on Experiment.com are usually delighted to talk about their work!

Cienna 4 Feb 2021 1:50 UTC
2 points
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on: Trying to help coral reefs survive climate change seems incredibly neglected.
I like this project shape: trying to keep a solved problem solved. We have functioning reefs to study. We already know some of the conditions they like. Our knowledge might not have to be as thorough to protect a system that is already working at scale compared to the level of knowledge needed to design, launch, and scale a solution to an unsolved problem.

Event: Complexity Weekend 5/21-5/23

Cienna14 Mar 2021 18:40 UTC

3 points

0 comments1 min readEA link

Cienna 23 Mar 2021 14:17 UTC
10 points
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on: EA Funds has appointed new fund managers
Congratulations to y’all on your new roles and responsibilities!!!

Cienna 24 Mar 2021 11:23 UTC
7 points
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on: Proposed Longtermist Flag
Here’s the link to the SVG. I don’t think you should have to pay for an SVG. I downloaded the JPG and put it through vectorizer.io.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/4fvviw1s3yveeri/Longtermist-Flag.svg?dl=0
And here’s a TED talk I really enjoyed about flag design: https://www.ted.com/talks/roman_mars_why_city_flags_may_be_the_worst_designed_thing_you_ve_never_noticed
What links here?
- What Would A Longtermist Flag Look Like? by Cullen (24 Mar 2021 5:40 UTC; 33 points)

Cienna 27 Mar 2021 15:10 UTC
7 points
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on: Proposed Longtermist Flag
Continuing to play with the space, light cone, time, warning light, and blue dot elements, here’s another. I’m not trying to symbolize longtermism specifically here, but I do think this arrangement fits something present.
Colors
I like the thinking behind the color choices in the original, so I tried to do that too.
- Eigengrau instead of black: Eigengrau is the almost-black color humans see when we close our eyes in darkness, darkness as perceived by human vision. It’s black with visual artifacts of uncountably many points of light. It rhymes with how we see space, and represents the eyes-closed opposite of enlightenment.
- pale yellow instead of white: stark white feels lifeless/barren/rhetorical, while sunlight is a human universal. Technically that color would be rather more blue, but I didn’t want 3:1 in cold’s favor, and our experience of sunlight is “warm”.
- global blue : I like ocean blue, but global blue is traditional and recognizable.
- almost-red shocking pink: this color was tricky and unsatisfying. True traditional red is associated with the vigorous bloodshed of war. Amber felt slower, like plasma seepage and electronic running lights. But comparing them side by side, this weird in-between color feels more right. I don’t know from whence it comes and it’s troubling me, and that feeling seemed to fit, so I went with the red-pink. And disagreeing about whether this particular shade is red or pink would be the kind of moving-concepts-around time-wasting disagreement that so often distracts resources from problem-solving.

Shapes
Four-pointed star: a focus, or flaw that draws focus
- orienting star
(compass star, North star, Star of Bethlehem, LessWrong, Alcor, Quaker star)
- how stars or points of light appear to us, for reasons I’m not competent to explain—
Once I saw the bright “shadows” created by bubbles on the surface of water concentrating sunlight on the stone below, and at a certain depth the anti-shadows looked like curved four-pointed stars.
- the shape of a wound created by an X-shaped cut
Semicircle: the known world
- as a sphere: planet, sphere of influence
- as a hemispherical bubble: habitat, growth, celestial heavens of antiquity
- as an arc: arc of history/narrative, rise and fall

Arrangement/assembly/explication
The darkness is unknown. Can contain risk, ignorance, space, void, death, etc. as you like.
Enlightenment is a growing buffer between the world and the unknown. Can contain hope, mercy, knowledge, skill, empathy, consciousness, energy etc. as you like.
Darkness holds three corners, and light one. However, darkness holds less than half the area.
The expansion of hope/mercy/enlightenment has both a linear and a non-linear growth aspect.
This star/wound/pain/warning/flaw connects the three, or is in all three. It sometimes obscures what’s going on between the other three. It’s the central focus. It’s in the middle of everything.
From left to right, there’s a progression in time from the beginning in void to the post-world end where enlightenment dominates, yet cannot eliminate the unknown.
Does the story arc get interrupted, or obscured?
And is this burst of pain an event in time, or a constant element?
Is the wound in the middle opening or closing?
Does pain orient or distract?

Reflection

In retrospect, I may be guilty of being quite influenced by other brands I like. I was not consciously thinking of these when I was working on this design, so I’m not sure how much is my fault and how much is convergence/overlap.
- Black triangle on top-left, yellow on the right: I have previously considered myself anarcho-capitalist.
- red and black Quaker star: I don’t know what the Quaker star symbolizes, but I like the connotations of humility, principles, service, and insistence on a kinder future. I don’t “identify” as anything religious, but I occasionally attend the local Friends’ Meeting.
The result also reminds me of Jordan Peterson’s work: in a world made of chaos, order, suffering, and matter, one needs a negative motivation, a positive motivation, a foundation to stand on, and a direction in which to go. “Life is suffering,” but what you do about that is up to you.
Made using Amadine. An editable SVG version is here in case you want to build on it further.

Cienna 27 Mar 2021 21:23 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Proposed Longtermist Flag
Sure!

Cienna 27 Mar 2021 21:26 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Cienna’s comment on: Proposed Longtermist Flag
A more abstract one with some similar pieces...

Cienna

Eval­u­at­ing a crowd­fund­ing cam­paign to test an oral an­thrax vac­cine for wildlife

Event: Com­plex­ity Week­end 5/​21-5/​23

Evaluating a crowdfunding campaign to test an oral anthrax vaccine for wildlife

Event: Complexity Weekend 5/21-5/23