David M

• David M 8 Dec 2024 16:02 UTC

  18 points

  10 ∶ 0

  on: NYT—What if Char­ity Shouldn’t be Optimized

  Seems a lot of it is saying “you can’t put a price on x” — and then going ahead and putting a price on x anyway by saying we should prefer to fund x over y.

  In her book, Ms. Schiller ties her criticism of effective altruism to broader questions about optimization, writing: “At a time when we are under enormous pressure to optimize our time, be maximally productive, hustle and stay healthy (so we can keep hustling), we need philanthropy to make pleasure, splendor and abundance available for everyone.”

  Her conception of the good can include magnificence and meaning and abundance. But how can we make that available for everyone without the kinds of reasoning decried as ‘optimization’?

  I feel like the people saying “you can’t put a price on a beautiful holy site” are trying to avoid saying “you can, and the holy site is worth more than the lives the money could have saved”—it’s not impossible that Notre Dame is worth the lives unsaved (with its millions of visitors a year), but it is impossible to refute the claim unless they are honest about how they’re valuing it.

  It seems they’re missing the mood that our problems are larger than the resources we have to fix them, and so advocating for not facing the uncomfortable triage questions.

  (My comments inspired by /​ plagiarised from https://​​x.com/​​trevposts/​​status/​​1865495961612542233 )

• David M 25 Nov 2024 10:07 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: UK Per­sonal Fi­nance Tips & Info

  CAF charges a fee for its services. This seems crucial to deciding between GAYE/​Payroll Giving vs Gift Aid — from the intro email when I registered to do GAYE:

  For direct CAF Give As You Earn donors, we take a 4% fee of your total donation to cover our costs (the fee will never be more than £10 per pay period).

  Many employers pay this fee for their employees, and you should contact your payroll team to confirm if this is the case.

  My employer doesn’t cover it so I’m looking for an alternative method.

• David M 14 Oct 2024 9:22 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Which EA orgs provide feed­back on test tasks?

  In 2022 I applied to the marketing department of 80000 Hours. After a compensated ²⁄₃ day (I can’t remember) work test, which ultimately did not get me the job, I was offered a feedback call. I instead requested the feedback in an email and received detailed feedback.

• David M 21 Sep 2024 16:34 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David M’s comment on: Sum­mary: Against Anti-Fa­nat­i­cism (Chris­tian Tarsney)

  The paper says:

  Permissivism can take multiple forms. For instance, it might permit both fanatical and antifanatical preferences. Or it might permit (or even, its name notwithstanding, require) incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti-fanatical. But apart from noting its existence, we will say no more about the permissivist alternative for now, returning to it only in the concluding section.

  The takeaway, I think, is that those who find fanaticism counterintuitive should favor not anti-fanaticism but permissivism. More specifically, they should favor a version of permissivism that permits incomplete preferences that are neither fanatical nor anti-fanatical.

• David M 21 Sep 2024 16:27 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Sum­mary: Against Anti-Fa­nat­i­cism (Chris­tian Tarsney)

  Now I want to know what the hell permissivism is!

• David M 21 Sep 2024 15:04 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Sum­mary: In Defence of Fa­nat­i­cism (Hay­den Wilk­in­son)

  Thanks for the helpful summary. I feel it’s worth pointing out that these arguments (which seem strong!) defend only fanaticism per se, but not a stronger claim that is used or assumed when people argue for long-termism. The stronger claim being that we ought to follow Expected Value Maximization. It’s a stronger ask in the sense that we’re asked to take bets not of arbitrarily high payoffs, which can be ‘gamed’ to be high enough to be worth taking, but ‘only’ some specific astronomically high payoffs, which are derived from (as it were) empirically determined information, facts about the universe that ultimately give the payoff upper bounds. That said, it’s helpful to have these arguments to show that ‘longtermism depends on being fanatical’ is not a knock-down argument against longtermism. Here’s one example of that link being made: ”...the case for longtermism may depend either on plausible but non-obvious empirical claims or on a tolerance for Pascalian fanaticism” (Tarsney, 2019).

• David M 21 Sep 2024 14:09 UTC

  8 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben Stewart’s comment on: Can a ter­ror­ist at­tack cause hu­man ex­tinc­tion? Not on priors

  Hi Ben, I’m curious if this public-facing report is out yet, and if not, where could someone reading this in the future look to check (so you don’t have to repeatedly field the same question)?
  
  > I appreciate the push to get a public-facing version of the report published—I’m on it!

• David M 3 Jul 2024 9:29 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Cen­ter for Effec­tive Aid Policy has shut down

  I found your description of applying effort to a really difficult task, and eventually making the hard decision to cut your losses, inspiring and moving. Thank you to CEAP’s founders, funders, and other supporters.

• David M 18 Jun 2024 17:43 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: OscarD🔸’s comment on: S-risks, X-risks, and Ideal Futures

  I think high X-risk makes working on X-risk more valuable only if you believe that you can have a durable effect on the level of X-risk—here’s MacAskill talking about the hinge-of-history hypothesis (which is closely related to the ‘time of perils’ hypothesis):

  Or perhaps extinction risk is high, but will stay high indefinitely, in which case in expectation we do not have a very long future ahead of us, and the grounds for thinking that extinction risk reduction is of enormous value fall away.

• David M 17 Jun 2024 13:54 UTC

  15 points

  4 ∶ 0

  in reply to: DavidNash’s comment on: Mr Beast is now offi­cially en­gaged in effec­tive giv­ing!

  If you’re attending the Leaders Forum or are a ‘key figure in EA’, you’re probably an EA, even if you don’t admit it to yourself.

• David M 21 May 2024 19:19 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Helping loved ones with their fi­nances: the why and how of an un­usu­ally im­pact­ful op­por­tu­nity

  How much of this advice is generally applicable outside the US?

• David M 17 May 2024 22:42 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Agustín Covarrubias 🔸’s comment on: My La­ment to EA

  Indeed not. I think that trying to appeal to those who chase prestige selects against truth-seeking and altruism, and I don’t think merely focusing on top unis has that effect. I’m responding to the part of the post about appealing to prestige chasers.

• David M 17 May 2024 9:49 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: DavidNash’s comment on: My La­ment to EA

  I believe the connection (which might or might not directly pick up on something you are defending?) is that if you go beyond merely starting your student community building with top universities first as a heuristic, and you further concentrate spending on the top universities to extreme degrees, you are in fact assuming a very strong distinction between those universities. David T has described the distinction in an approximate way as saying there are ‘only’ influential/​high-earning-potential people at top universities.

  The assumption of a strong distinction can be read from how the decision to concentrate implies it takes a huge amount of marginal funding before the diminishing returns of giving the next dollar to top unis is considered less valuable than giving a first dollar to a mid-range uni.

  To defend large disparities between funding of different universities, it’s not enough to say ‘well you have to draw the line somewhere as you can only fund so many universities’; you need to further justify the choice to treat top universities as being in another class.

  And arguably that’s an elitist worldview which sees a large difference between top unis and the rest — it’s more elitist if it talks about large talent gaps, implying top unis are able to filter students on intelligence very well; and it’s less elitist if it talks only about ‘people who will go on to be influential’, putting the blame of elitism on the society that rewards elite resumes.

  That’s how I relate what David T has been saying, to what you said, DavidNash.

• David M 17 May 2024 9:28 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: My La­ment to EA

  I’ve never affiliated with a university group. I’m sad to hear that at least some university groups seem to be trying to appeal to ambitious prestige-chasers, and I hope it’s not something that the CEA Groups team has applied generally. I wonder if it comes from a short-sighted strategy of trying to catch those who are most likely to end up in powerful positions in the future, which would be in line with the reasons there has been a focus on the most prestigious universities. I call it short-sighted because filling the next generation of your movement with people who are light on values and strong on politics seems like a certain way to kill what’s valuable about EA (such as commitments to altruism and truth-seeking).

• David M 7 May 2024 18:21 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  in reply to: David M’s comment on: An im­pact­ful op­por­tu­nity to take ac­tion for an­i­mals, by to­day (May 7th): Re­ply to UK gov­ern­ment’s open con­sul­ta­tion on food welfare labelling

  Many of the questions ask you to pick among ‘Strongly disagree’ through ‘Strongly agree’ and most questions are optional. For those likert/​select-an-option questions, I guess the survey analysers would do more aggregation among survey-takers, so quantity would matter there.

• David M 7 May 2024 15:38 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Kirsten’s comment on: An im­pact­ful op­por­tu­nity to take ac­tion for an­i­mals, by to­day (May 7th): Re­ply to UK gov­ern­ment’s open con­sul­ta­tion on food welfare labelling

  For context, Kirsten has long worked for UK government departments.

• David M 7 May 2024 15:33 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: CounterBlunder’s comment on: An im­pact­ful op­por­tu­nity to take ac­tion for an­i­mals, by to­day (May 7th): Re­ply to UK gov­ern­ment’s open con­sul­ta­tion on food welfare labelling

  No. It just has a question ‘Where are you based in the UK?’, with an option to say ‘not UK-based’ and specify where you are.

• David M 7 May 2024 13:28 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An im­pact­ful op­por­tu­nity to take ac­tion for an­i­mals, by to­day (May 7th): Re­ply to UK gov­ern­ment’s open con­sul­ta­tion on food welfare labelling

  Grayden comments:

  I think generally they are looking for issues to consider rather than doing a straw poll of public opinion, hence quality over quantity

• David M 7 May 2024 10:56 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Toby Tremlett🔹’s comment on: An im­pact­ful op­por­tu­nity to take ac­tion for an­i­mals, by to­day (May 7th): Re­ply to UK gov­ern­ment’s open con­sul­ta­tion on food welfare labelling

  Yes; that Google doc is linked to as the call to action of the linked post :)

• David M 3 May 2024 12:17 UTC

  11 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Émile P. Tor­res’s his­tory of dishon­esty and harassment

  Emile is often the source for articles on EA in the media. (link to duplicate comment in other subthread, with examples)