Big +1 to making weighted factor model spreadsheets for decisions! They’re soooo good (for small decisions too). Plus, once you’ve made one, you can reuse the template :) All great advice Alexandra, thanks for writing this up!
Damin Curtis
Karma: 92
Great idea! This could be a great way to think of gift ideas and get more people to donate around holidays/special events. I wonder if there’s room to expand/proliferate projects like this...
I’m so sorry to hear this news. I’m glad that this community can be a place of remembrance and to honor Sebastian’s commitment to impact and giving. I especially wish strength and peace for Sebastian’s family.
Summary of Eliezer Yudkowsky’s “Cognitive Biases Potentially Affecting Judgment of Global Risks”
Very interesting write-up, thank you for it.
As pointed out in an earlier comment, raising the compensation for challenge trials and/or seeking out participants with lower ‘willing participation price’ seems promising as a way to get enough participants.
I would be interested to see an analysis on the “donation equivalent” of participation.
E.G. if it would cost 10k to pay a willing participant, and an EA were willing to do it for free for social good, is this the “equivalent” of a 10k donation to an effective health cause? If not, approximately how much would it be worth? Putting a number on this would be interesting, and could help individuals decide whether to participate (comparing to their opportunity costs, etc).
Heck, maybe if we had a number, individuals who track donations could even log challenge participation as a number amount towards their donation goal (e.g. for those who donate 10% of their incomes), though that’s probably a whole different conversation.
I agree that increasing compensation to a happy price might be better than relying on altruism, and that selecting for altruistic individuals might mean selecting for those with high opportunity costs.
However, I don’t like the language or sentiment behind calling non-EAs “normies” especially in a context like this. I think both the nomenclature and the blanket sentiment is bad epistemics, bad for the EA brand, and potential evidence of a problematic worldview.
Thanks for your comment & questions! These are great questions for further research. I don’t know enough to comment on the first question. But as for the second, we’re lucky that right now, the advanced chip supply chain has multiple tight bottlenecks, and is largely controlled by US-allied advanced democracies (Taiwan, Korea, Japan, Netherlands, UK, US, etc). This is part of why the US was able to effectively cut off China’s access to obtaining the most advanced chips. So there is a window of opportunity, where the most important countries could agree to require their companies to implement this framework, and require certain buyers to comply with the framework as well. Countries generally can require their companies to manufacture a certain way, and can also set import/export restrictions on chips to ensure transactions are compliant.
A New Model for Compute Center Verification
Drew is a personal friend of mine, as is a nonlinear employee not mentioned in this post, so I am saddened to read this. I am waiting to see Nonlinear’s response.
Thanks for this, lab safety deserves so much attention and zooming in on regional contexts might be really high impact.
“Establish a non-punitive accident reporting system” seems really important, and very interesting because getting those incentives right seems difficult (punishing malpractice vs incentiving hiding issues from authorities). But it’s probably better to air on the side of not discouraging reporting!
This was a super motivating post. I saved many bits & pieces in a separate google keep note to look back on as I apply. I especially needed to hear the stuff about getting less attached to each application and needing to have a numbers-game mindset. Thank you for writing such a great piece!
Animal Weapons: Lessons for Humans in the Age of X-Risk
This is so exciting, I can’t wait to try it! Big congrats & thanks to all the researchers, advocates, funders, etc who got this done. Monumental.
I’m so glad you made this post.
Super glad to see this. Demonstrating how EA fits into different schools of islamic thought does sound like a huge undertaking, but hopefully one with important and scaling returns. I would be very interested to know more about EA uptake rates in different (islamic) national contexts, like growth of EA Malaysia vs any efforts to bring EA to gulf countries.
Is there a central group, slack, or task force thinking about/working on bringing EA to muslims and vice versa? Thanks for writing up this post!
I do this all the time when I realize I’m not gonna get a full night’s sleep, so I just say “screw it, might as well keep staying up”. This is completely irrational of me and this post is a welcome reminder that 5 hrs of sleep is still much better than 4!
Nice! These kinds of solutions often seem the most effective and neglected, almost by default. Excited to see where this goes!
Wow! How exciting. Thanks for the update!
This brought tears to my eyes, thank you for posting. The Yad Vashem Museum is so beautiful and heavy. Looking for common denominators among the exceptional few who became rescuers seems like a high potential value pursuit for EA.
This is very exciting! Can’t wait to CE’s successful formula applied to new high-impact areas & programs.