Cullen_OKeefe

• Cullen_OKeefe 23 Jan 2019 19:48 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Brendon_Wong's comment on: EAs Should In­vest All Year, then Give only on Giv­ing Tuesday

  Done, thanks :-)

• Cullen_OKeefe 11 Jan 2019 15:43 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Jeff_Kaufman's comment on: EAs Should In­vest All Year, then Give only on Giv­ing Tuesday

  Thanks Jeff. I agree.

  Note that, strictly speak­ing, the for­mula is the value of a given dol­lar if in­vested un­til GT. So, if we’re refer­ring to the 20,001st dol­lar, then we should prob­a­bly ad­just the prob­a­bil­ity of it get­ting matched down, way be­low my 30%. (Due to the time it takes to make sev­eral dona­tions on Giv­ing Tues­day morn­ing, that prob­a­bil­ity should curve down be­fore that any­way). But if you still as­sign it a prob­a­bil­ity of 12%, it’s worth do­ing now.

  My per­sonal cre­dence that dona­tions above $20K would be matched is prob­a­bly much lower than this for the rea­sons you iden­tify, though.

• Cullen_OKeefe 11 Jan 2019 15:38 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: WilliamKiely's comment on: EAs Should In­vest All Year, then Give only on Giv­ing Tuesday

  And note that you can ad­just for the prob­a­bil­ity of value drift in the spread­sheet :-)

EAs Should In­vest All Year, then Give only on Giv­ing Tuesday

• Cullen_OKeefe 4 Jan 2019 20:46 UTC

  3 points

  on: [Link] How to set up your planned giv­ing now

  Set up a bank ac­count benefi­ciary (CEA USA) as a re­sult of this. Thanks Aaron!

• Cullen_OKeefe 9 Dec 2018 21:50 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: eirine's comment on: Which Image Do You Pre­fer?: a study of vi­sual com­mu­ni­ca­tion in six Afri­can countries

  To­tally. I’ll do some elab­o­ra­tion on why I found it use­ful [we dis­cussed some of this on Face­book, but I thought it worth­while to post pub­li­cly :-)]:

  When I table for EA causes, I get a lot of push­back from left-lean­ing peo­ple that are wor­ried (both jus­tifi­ably and not) about his­to­ries of pa­ter­nal­is­tic and im­pe­ri­al­is­tic aid in the de­vel­op­ing world. Speci­fi­cally, a lot of grad stu­dents (where I am) are already quite com­mit­ted to us­ing a so­cial jus­tice frame­work to eval­u­ate po­ten­tial in­ter­ven­tions, which puts a lot of em­pha­sis on avoid­ing these things.

  I think EA as such does a good job of miti­gat­ing this at the ob­ject level by fo­cus­ing on demon­stra­ble im­pact. But I don’t think we cur­rently do a great job com­mu­ni­cat­ing this to peo­ple with those wor­ries, which in my ex­pe­rience are quite pop­u­lar. Adopt­ing bet­ter mes­sag­ing can be a cheap sig­nal that we take these con­cerns se­ri­ously, or moral trade with peo­ple who care about donor side at­ti­tudes more than effec­tive­ness. My pre­dic­tion is that this would po­ten­tially open them up to both global giv­ing and fur­ther en­gage­ment with EA. Other­wise, it’s hard for us to dis­t­in­guish our­selves from the refer­ence class of po­ten­tial white-sav­ior-y peo­ple who want to do good over­seas.

Which Image Do You Pre­fer?: a study of vi­sual com­mu­ni­ca­tion in six Afri­can countries

Fisher & Syed on Trad­able Obli­ga­tions to En­hance Health

• Cullen_OKeefe 5 Aug 2018 16:47 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: Bangladesh is in Des­per­ate Need For Effec­tive Altruists

  Thanks for shar­ing this with us, Farhan. Like Holly, my heart goes out to you and the peo­ple of Dhaka.

  I wish I was in a bet­ter po­si­tion to help. This feels a bit fee­ble, but I’m shar­ing it just be­cause there’s a small prob­a­bil­ity that it helps. The EA com­mu­nity has done a lit­tle work on traf­fic safety. Ob­vi­ously, this is quite differ­ent from the root prob­lem of poli­ti­cal cor­rup­tion. How­ever, given the en­tan­gle­ment of the cor­rup­tion/​vi­o­lence with the traf­fic safety cat­a­lyst here, per­haps some of the listed or­ga­ni­za­tions would am­plify the con­cerns be­ing voiced and bring more at­ten­tion to Bangladesh—both the traf­fic is­sue and the re­sult­ing protests/​crack­down.

• Cullen_OKeefe 5 Aug 2018 16:12 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelPlant's comment on: Har­vard EA’s 2018–19 Vision

  Thanks Michael! I’ve linked to a Google Doc ver­sion with foot­notes for ease-of-read­ing: https://​docs.google.com/​doc­u­ment/​d/​1i1-57jRg7vr­cTBXAc­qIFAYzGoC-bftIMnElqPKFGMVk/​edit?usp=sharing

• Cullen_OKeefe 4 Aug 2018 23:47 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: rossaokod's comment on: One for the World as a po­ten­tial ve­hi­cle to ex­pand the reach of Effec­tive Altruism

  This is cor­rect about HLS. We think that OFTW out­reach has gen­er­ally been a good way to build name recog­ni­tion for EA—if you ask peo­ple what we do, they know about OFTW be­cause it’s a big, very visi­ble effort. I think there’s some risk that they think we’re limited to poverty work (a gen­eral EA prob­lem), but I don’t think this is an un­avoid­able con­se­quence of our part­ner­ship with OFTW—it’s be­cause our other pro­gram­ming has so far been less visi­ble.

  It’s also a good way for us to strat­ify our pro­gram­ming (both for our mem­bers and for in­volv­ing non-mem­bers) so that we have mean­ingful in­ter­ac­tion with both EA-sym­pa­thetic “nor­mal” (i.e., not EA ca­reer things) peo­ple and ca­reer-minded EAs.

Har­vard EA’s 2018–19 Vision

• Cullen_OKeefe 8 Jul 2018 23:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Andaro's comment on: Govern­men­tal CBA as an EA Ca­reer Step: A Shal­low Investigation

  I gen­er­ally agree, which is why I ex­plic­itly ac­knowl­edge this in the post. But I also think you’re mis­taken about what’s demo­crat­i­cally fea­si­ble. The cit­i­zenry definitely gives a nonzero value to for­eign lives (e.g., https://​www.wash­ing­ton­post.com/​news/​mon­key-cage/​wp/​2017/​05/​04/​amer­i­cans-love-to-hate-for­eign-aid-but-the-right-ar­gu­ment-makes-them-like-it-a-lot-more/​?noredi­rect=on&utm_term=.208535615b42), but cur­rent CBA only weighs them quan­ti­ta­tively (which is as good as not at all). I re­ally doubt that diminish­ing the dis­count­ing rate by a point or so would en­gen­der poli­ti­cal back­lash; most peo­ple pre­sum­ably think we should care about the fu­ture too and in any case have no clue what the dis­count rate is.

  Ba­si­cally, the so­cial welfare func­tion of the US cit­i­zenry is ac­tu­ally prob­a­bly more cos­mopoli­tan than cur­rent CBA. CBA is pretty well iso­lated from poli­ti­cal scrutiny (most peo­ple have no idea what it is and it gen­er­ally has bi­par­ti­san sup­port), so I don’t think minor pos­i­tive ad­just­ments are a big risk.

• Cullen_OKeefe 8 Jul 2018 21:30 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: Safa_Amirbayat's comment on: Govern­men­tal CBA as an EA Ca­reer Step: A Shal­low Investigation

  Thanks! I’ve added it to the Goodreads list.

Govern­men­tal CBA as an EA Ca­reer Step: A Shal­low Investigation

• Cullen_OKeefe 26 Mar 2018 21:51 UTC

  0 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: An­nounc­ing Re­think Pri­ori­ties

  Su­per in­ter­est­ing! Keep up the good work! :-)

• Cullen_OKeefe 26 Mar 2018 21:49 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: We Could Move $80 Million to Effec­tive Char­i­ties, Pineap­ples Included

  A fi­nal up­date for this: it looks like they have stopped con­sid­er­ing new ap­pli­ca­tions. They have made grants to the fol­low­ing (ar­guably) EA orgs:

  • GiveDirectly ($2 MM)

  • Pos­si­ble ($1 MM)

  • MAPS ($5 MM)

  • SENS ($2 MM)

  To­tal di­rected to EA orgs: $10MM

  Apolo­gies if I’m miss­ing any.

• Cullen_OKeefe 17 Jan 2018 6:53 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: We Could Move $80 Million to Effec­tive Char­i­ties, Pineap­ples Included

  It looks like they also donated to Pos­si­ble, which is a TLYCS char­ity :-)

• Cullen_OKeefe 21 Dec 2017 23:24 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: We Could Move $80 Million to Effec­tive Char­i­ties, Pineap­ples Included

  I’m run­ning a Pre­dic­tionBook pre­dic­tion on the suc­cess of this: https://​pre­dic­tion­book.com/​pre­dic­tions/​188373 :-)