Done, thanks for posting this! Concrete ways to take action in a high-impact, low-input way are really nice to see on the forum!
Damin Curtisš¹
Karma: 148
Just sent a letter. This post was what pushed me to do itāI am a CA voter and have never written a letter urging the governor to take action on legislation before, and I believe I wouldnāt have done so without 1. reading this post and 2. reading Will MacAskillās comment on this post. So thatās counterfactual impact on your part, nice one!
Iād love to see this with select US states (like California) included as their own bars. This is super interesting, thanks for making it!
Nice, just donated my $31.23 worth of Mana to GiveWell! Wouldnāt have known to do that otherwise, and took about 30 seconds. Thanks for the post :)
This is very exciting! Canāt wait to CEās successful formula applied to new high-impact areas & programs.
Big +1 to making weighted factor model spreadsheets for decisions! Theyāre soooo good (for small decisions too). Plus, once youāve made one, you can reuse the template :) All great advice Alexandra, thanks for writing this up!
Great idea! This could be a great way to think of gift ideas and get more people to donate around holidays/āspecial events. I wonder if thereās room to expand/āproliferate projects like this...
Iām so sorry to hear this news. Iām glad that this community can be a place of remembrance and to honor Sebastianās commitment to impact and giving. I especially wish strength and peace for Sebastianās family.
Very interesting write-up, thank you for it.
As pointed out in an earlier comment, raising the compensation for challenge trials and/āor seeking out participants with lower āwilling participation priceā seems promising as a way to get enough participants.
I would be interested to see an analysis on the ādonation equivalentā 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 āequivalentā 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 thatās 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 donāt like the language or sentiment behind calling non-EAs ānormiesā 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 donāt know enough to comment on the first question. But as for the second, weāre 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 Chinaās 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/āexport restrictions on chips to ensure transactions are compliant.
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 Nonlinearās response.
Thanks for this, lab safety deserves so much attention and zooming in on regional contexts might be really high impact.
āEstablish a non-punitive accident reporting systemā seems really important, and very interesting because getting those incentives right seems difficult (punishing malpractice vs incentiving hiding issues from authorities). But itās 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!
This is so exciting, I canāt wait to try it! Big congrats & thanks to all the researchers, advocates, funders, etc who got this done. Monumental.
Iām 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/āworking on bringing EA to muslims and vice versa? Thanks for writing up this post!
I do this all the time when I realize Iām not gonna get a full nightās sleep, so I just say āscrew it, might as well keep staying upā. 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!
It only asked me for my name (not citizenship, residency, or address), so not sure if they cross check with a citizens directory or something, but the UK didnāt require citizenship to answer a public consultation on the kinds of causes their international aid should go towards so it seems like they just allow anyone to give input.