Clara Torres Latorre 🔸

Karma: 416

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 28 May 2026 18:22 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 0
on: My disagreements with CEA’s approach to stewarding EA
Fantastic post, thank you for airing it.
Something that I can say at a personal level is: I find it very hard to trust a paid community builder, be it a priest, an amateur orchestra conductor or an EA community builder. I see conflicts of interest everywhere.
On the other hand, I think growing the movement makes sense, and having people dedicated to it makes sense, so if someone is doing it you want to measure how they are doing, etc
I find it very hard to reconcile.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 27 May 2026 20:10 UTC
16 points
2 ∶ 0
on: EA organizations should pay experts to peer review their paper drafts and research proposals
By the way, I clicked the link (finally), and:
- I don’t find Wiley anywhere
- I don’t see a physical address anywhere
- Meritpeer claims big numbers of users, but I didn’t find anyone talking about it (trustpilot, reddit, etc)
- They have premium pricing to speed review up to 5 days or even 2 days
I wouldn’t even give it a chance, this aren’t a couple red flags, we talking November 1917 situation here.
Which makes me sad, because I really like the broader point of engaging with mainstream academia and playing ball, and I’ve been nerdsniped by a discussion about peer review and feel that I’m derailing the comment section.
What links here?
- EA organizations should pay experts to peer review their paper drafts and research proposals by Yarrow Bouchard 🔸 (26 May 2026 21:06 UTC; 22 points)

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 27 May 2026 20:04 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: dan.pandori’s comment on: EA organizations should pay experts to peer review their paper drafts and research proposals
I computed the time that it takes me * my salary, approx.
Ofc if I did this as a freelancer I would charge more.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 27 May 2026 16:45 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: EA organizations should pay experts to peer review their paper drafts and research proposals
Take this with a huge grain of salt, because thing vary enormously field to field.
10 days turnaround sounds too good to be true to me. If it was 6 months I would maybe give it a try for value of information.
But there’s more:
Price seems cheap: Last paper I reviewed took me 10-15 hours, so 300-500 + tax would be a reasonable price range and 150-250 sounds meagre. And you need to factor in admin, infra and costs that are not just paying the reviewer.
In my field, peer review is “pro bono” but done during the “working hours” of people with public salaries mostly. And there’s the understanding that since we publish and someone else reviews, we also should review some. However, that means that the availability to review varies a lot depending on teaching, research, admin, etc, and we usually fit it in with low priority.
That means if you want someone to review a paper, even if they only need 2 days, the people that have the expertise usually have work to do and might not be willing to give up on next weekend.
About “what if I got paid”, it’s complicated, bc it depends on if I really have the time (meaning, no plans on the only weekend in the 10 day window, and willing to work), but probably not.
And there’s also an ugh factor about getting paid for something that we usually do for free / as part of a salaried job. I’m not decided on it.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 27 May 2026 7:19 UTC
23 points
7 ∶ 0
on: EA organizations should pay experts to peer review their paper drafts and research proposals
I agree with the general point of the post.
But I disagree with specifically using Wiley’s services to obtain peer review [1].
I would be excited for people in EA sending their “research” pieces to mainstream academic journals more often.
[1] I’m a math researcher in academia. When I peer review an article, I’m usually granted 60 to 90 (sometimes more) days, depending on length. Adding admin, sometimes multiple times of revision, the time that editors need to find a suitable reviewer, missed deadlines… the whole process usually amounts to at least 6 months, and sometimes it takes years.
I don’t think 10 days is a reasonable timeline for peer review, and I find it even short to find a relevant and willing reviewer.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 25 May 2026 19:06 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Tommy Crow’s comment on: [unknown]
how big is the effect size?

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 21 May 2026 6:31 UTC
12 points
4 ∶ 0
in reply to: Benevolent_Rain’s comment on: Ulrik Horn’s Quick takes
Relatedly, I have met people doing “AI safety” stuff without having impact in mind, and end up doing research on whatever shiny academic vaguely related topic without a clear theory of change, while still being intermingled with the EA crowd sociologically.
Some of them pay lip service to impact and write theories of change to get funds (as a pure mathematician, we do that in my line of work and I think I can recognize when you say there is impact to get the research you are obsessed with funded, and when you are actually trying to do good in the world).

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 20 May 2026 20:07 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Laura Duffy’s comment on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
Hey, thanks for your reply, I found it very informative.
I’m excited to read your sensitivity analysis writeup when you publish it.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 20 May 2026 16:10 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Announcing the Rethink Priorities Cross-Cause Fund
I’m curious about how you model the time discounting more in detail:
As I read it right now, you pick six fixed multipliers for six fixed future time intervals. Am I understanding this correctly?
Under some assumptions that are common in EA that I don’t share such as the time of perils hypothesis, this would mean that, at least for some ways of computing, most utility is in the 500+ bucket.
And then the model would be very sensitive to people putting 0 vs any nonzero number for the 500+ years bucket. Is this the case?

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 18 May 2026 16:13 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 1
in reply to: Yarrow Bouchard 🔸’s comment on: Yarrow Bouchard’s Quick takes
I’m curious on why you can’t (as opposed to don’t want to or will not) discuss these on the EA Forum.
In my view, there are many points in the articles that could be interesting for discussion.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 9 May 2026 8:26 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
on: SWAPC Commitments on Cost-Effectiveness, Transparency and Faith-Informed Impact
I think the devil is in the details. The principles are fine but what really matters is the operationalization. Hard to tell without more information about the program.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 6 May 2026 8:28 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Stephen McAleese’s comment on: What is the Expected Value of Working on AI Safety? I Ran the Numbers.
How so?
As I read it this post compares to donations to Givewell, not to donations to AI safety research.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 6 May 2026 7:51 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: You probably won’t successfully build up skills and become capable enough.
I think there is a huge difference between:
- Being hired by an EA (TM) org
- Doing something counterfactually impactful
If you were hired by an EA org as paid staff, you only get credit for the % that you are better than the next possible hire.
On the other hand, if you have a normal job and donate, all the donations are counterfactual.
Similarly, if you do unpaid work the bar is much lower, and would be something akin to “are the coordination costs worth it?”.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 6 May 2026 7:45 UTC
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: You probably won’t successfully build up skills and become capable enough.
BTW, Doing earn to give is still valuable(if you can donate over $50,000 a year).
This is still an extremely high bar.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 1 May 2026 14:17 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Egalitarianism Is False
Hi,
I care instrumentally, because it may impact negative on the welfare of other people.

And yes, I agree that this is totally compatible with rejecting egalitarianism and prioritarianism, but it’s not so obvious.

I was trying to illustrate why I think many people endorse some sort of egalitarianism and have thoughts like “inequality bad”, which are easy to confuse with “inequality intrinsically bad”.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 1 May 2026 13:14 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Egalitarianism Is False
I have another intuition for egalitarianism: the distribution of power.
Most resources in our world can be traded for influence/power, such as money, time and materials.
Therefore, in the real scenarios that guide our intuitions, inequality is associated with concentration of power.
To put it in a charicature example: I don’t care if TechnoBro 3000 celebrates his birthday in the asteroid belt with his 10^30 gold plated robot friends, but I do care if he can buy the elections of Democratistan.

This is not a rebuttal of the narrow definition of egalitarianism, but is close enough to work as an intuition pump if we are not being very theoretical.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 1 May 2026 11:15 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Denkenberger🔸’s comment on: P(doom) ranges from 10% to 99% depending on who you ask. I searched 1,259 hours of AI safety podcasts to map the actual disagreements.
Maybe because P(doom) ranges from 10% to 99% excludes many people that state a lower P(doom) or refuse to state a number.

Maybe because Will MacAskill sits at 10–20%, calling himself “optimistic today” — but notes this is among the lowest estimates in serious circles implies people that state a lower number are not serious.

Those were my reasons to think of downvoting. In the end I didn’t do it because at the time the post was already in the negatives.

There is a huge selection bias coming into play here, where people that appear in AI safety podcasts or use the expression P(doom) have self-selected for higher numbers than people that don’t, and this is not addressed in the post.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 29 Apr 2026 17:24 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: HPV in Low Income Countries—An Important Cause Area for EA
Questions:
How does your estimate of $800 per DALY compare to other more established interventions such as insecticide treated bednets and vitamin A supplementation?
Do you have any cost effectiveness numbers for screening?

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 29 Apr 2026 17:12 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Katharina Hofmann’s comment on: Why better arguments don‘t necessarily change minds
Oh, I understand.
Unfortunately my German is not that good and I’m worried that an AI translation would cause some of the problems that I said earlier.

Clara Torres Latorre 🔸 29 Apr 2026 16:11 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Katharina Hofmann’s comment on: Why better arguments don‘t necessarily change minds
Yes, I meant in terms of style, but also in the sense that AI adds filler and obfuscates how ideas relate to each other.
Can you link the paper here?