david_reinstein

• david_reinstein 10 Dec 2024 0:29 UTC

  7 points

  2 ∶ 1

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: Ozzie Gooen’s Shortform

  Quick thought. Maybe people anticipate this being blocked by governments because it “seems like playing god” etc. I know that would be hypocritical given the breeding already used to make them overweight etc. But it seems to be the way a lot of people see this.

• david_reinstein 9 Dec 2024 4:39 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: List of orgs/​peo­ple funded by ~EA to do re­search?

  Here’s a take, just using Open Phil data and my ad-hoc judgment, as a start:
  
  As a filterable Coda table

• david_reinstein 9 Dec 2024 3:56 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: List of orgs/​peo­ple funded by ~EA to do re­search?

  That’s helpful as some of these are relevant. (But I’m looking for a list of ‘orgs funded to do research’.)

• david_reinstein 7 Dec 2024 21:57 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: List of orgs/​peo­ple funded by ~EA to do re­search?

  https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​pwPbQPv8EL9piJRfa/​​effectivealtruismdata-com-is-now-a-spreadsheet
  
  @Hamish McDoodles would this be a good source for answering this question?

• david_reinstein 7 Dec 2024 21:57 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Ben Millwood🔸’s comment on: List of orgs/​peo­ple funded by ~EA to do re­search?

  Thanks, my bad. Should have gone to https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​N3hsGxSPNMQS4wADy/​​should-the-unjournal-evaluate-1-research-outputs-per

  Now fixed

[Question] List of orgs/​peo­ple funded by ~EA to do re­search?

• david_reinstein 6 Dec 2024 3:58 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: david_re­in­stein’s Shortform

  There are quite a few posts/​some discussion on

  1. The value of language learning for career capital

  2. The dominance of English in EA and the advantages it confers

  See., e.g., https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​qf6pGhm9a7vTMFLtc/​​english-as-a-dominant-language-in-the-movement-challenges

  https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​k7igqbN52XtmJGBZ8/​​effective-language-learning-for-effective-altruists

  I expect these issues to become less important very soon as new AI-powered technology gets better. To an extent, the Babblefish is already here and nearly useable.

  E.g., the latest timekettle translator earbuds (https://​​www.amazon.com/​​dp/​​B0BTP57ZRM?ref=ppx_yo2ov_dt_b_fed_asin_title&th=1) are getting rave reviews from some people (https://​​bsky.app/​​profile/​​joshuafmask.bsky.social/​​post/​​3lcm22p6nsc2o)

• david_reinstein 6 Dec 2024 3:52 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: The priv­ilege of na­tive English speak­ers in reach­ing high-sta­tus, in­fluen­tial po­si­tions in EA

  These already exist and they are getting pretty good, people say.

  https://​​bsky.app/​​profile/​​joshuafmask.bsky.social/​​post/​​3lcm22p6nsc2o

• david_reinstein 4 Dec 2024 16:58 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: titotal’s comment on: Should The Un­jour­nal eval­u­ate 1+ re­search out­puts per rele­vant EA org?

  This is part of what we’re trying to do (in a particular part of the research space atm … empirical/​quantitative social science). We are already evaluating/​have evaluated some research coming out of EA/​adjacent orgs. Hoping to do more of this and do it more systematically.

Should The Un­jour­nal eval­u­ate 1+ re­search out­puts per rele­vant EA org?

• david_reinstein 30 Nov 2024 15:01 UTC

  9 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: New Global Pri­ori­ties In­sti­tute re­search agendas

  Added the research agendas tag—I think this tag is very helpful for keeping track of these, avoiding overlap, finding relevant research questions, etc.

• david_reinstein 30 Nov 2024 0:12 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: [link] Schu­bert, Cavi­ola & Faber, ‘The Psy­chol­ogy of Ex­is­ten­tial Risk’

  At The Unjournal (unjournal.org), we’re assessing whether this research high-impact enough to commission for evaluation for The Unjournal. We prioritize research for evaluation not based on its quality, credibility, etc—that’s the evaluators’ role. Instead, we consider its potential for global impact, its current influence on funding, policy, and thinking, on whether we see room for fruitful evaluation, and on whether it fits in our teams’ wheelhouse and our field scope.

  I’m giving a take here to get responses from the authors and others in the field, and from stakeholders. And also to give anyone who reads this some insights into some of the things we consider in prioritizing research for evaluation (and getting possible feedback on this).
  
  Note, we’ve mainly covered research in economics and impact measurement. But we do have a ‘psychology and attitudes’ field specialist team, and I’d like to be evaluating more research in this area (but there are some particular challenges I won’t discuss here).

  Below, some considerations after a quick skim; your feedback is welcome. As it’s a skim some of my takes below may be naive. And it’s a bit of red-teaming.

  My impression of what the study finds

  They “Study how laypeople reason about human extinction.” They use mostly https://​​www.prolific.com/​​ samples, and, with various frames ask people to rank things triads like:

  (A) There is no catastrophe.
  (B) There is a catastrophe that immediately kills 80% of the world’s population.
  (C) There is a catastrophe that immediately kills 100% of the world’s population.

  And then

  In terms of badness, which difference is greater: the difference between A and B, or the difference between B and C?”

  Strikingly, however, they do not think that an extinction catastrophe would be uniquely bad relative to near-extinction catastrophes, which allow for recovery.

  I.e., people tend to state that the difference between B and A is much bigger than the difference between B and C.

  I would interpret as evidence that lay people’s quick takes/​intuitions/​gut attitudes are not total-population utilitarian, nor particularly extinction averse.

  Looking across frames, the ‘gradient’ is higher (relatively more people find C-B bigger than B-A_ for animal extinction vs animal crisis and for sterilization of everyone vs nearly everyone.

  According to the authors (and this seems reasonable to me) because they

  focus on the immediate death and suffering that the catastrophes cause for fellow humans, rather than on the long-term consequences.

  (d) laypeople—in line with prominent philosophical arguments—think that the quality of the future is relevant: they do find extinction uniquely bad when this means forgoing a utopian future.

  This is the ’Utopia Condition”:

  

  
  So, they find extinction uniquely bad in cases where the comparison is framed in particular ways to highlight how uniquely bad it is? But isn’t this a bit like leading the witness or driving agreeability bias? Are people in this condition really given alternate reasonable ways of considering this? It seems a bit forced, although I guess that it tells you that people are at least not extremely resistant to this argument.

  Could the study be impactful? Is it worth investing in commissioning an evaluation?

  This study was funded by BERI, CEA and others. Impact-oriented funders thought it was worth investing in. This also suggests it might have the potential to impact their future thinking and choices

  To understand ‘whether it could be impactful’ for myself, I would want a better sense of the goal, or of how the authors and people funding this study intended it to be used, or thought it could reasonably be used.
  
  Is the goal here to:
  
  1. Survey people’s attitudes to get at something normative; i.e., to understand the will of the people to be able to fulfill it?… Or is it
  
  2. To understand what could sway people to support x-risk reduction initiatives and legislation to avoid extinction-level risks?

  I’m not fully convinced that any particular empirical result here would have led to a meaningfully different conclusion, implication, and recommendation. Well, I’m not doubting this is the case; I just don’t see it obviously, and I’m very willing and eager to be convinced.

  Are the methods… hypothetical ~quick choices on a Prolific sample, the ranking and relative-difference elicitation, between-subject comparisons (I think)… ‘reasonable’ enough to tell us something useful?

  Are the Prolific samples (IMO the best we can do for things like these, but probably not representative of the US or UK “general public”) representative enough of the groups we care about for either goal 1 or 2 above?

• david_reinstein 27 Nov 2024 15:32 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Pulse 2024: At­ti­tudes to­wards ar­tifi­cial intelligence

  Good to see Pulse is back!

• david_reinstein 22 Nov 2024 20:41 UTC

  2 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: List of databases/​job boards to source promis­ing job can­di­dates from

  Thanks, this is helpful Is it worth adding links to this?

• david_reinstein 20 Nov 2024 3:48 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: AMA: PauseAI US needs money! Ask founder/​Exec Dir Holly El­more any­thing for 11/​19

  I’m trying to understand… what does “exempt” mean in the phrase “exempt, salaried employee”?

  Do you mean that your salary is part of the expenses of a tax-exempt nonprofit, so people who donate to PauseAI (partly to pay your salary) can deduct this from their taxes if they itemize their returns? And I’m trying to understand the connection between this and the idea of claiming pro-bono hours? Thanks!

• david_reinstein 19 Nov 2024 0:56 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Holly Elmore ⏸️ 🔸’s comment on: AMA: PauseAI US needs money! Ask founder/​Exec Dir Holly El­more any­thing for 11/​19

  Do you actually take the salary and donate it, or do you just claim a lower salary and call some hours ‘pro-bono’? Obviously the latter is more tax-efficient.

• david_reinstein 19 Nov 2024 0:54 UTC

  12 points

  2 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MichaelStJules’s comment on: Dona­tion Elec­tion Dis­cus­sion Thread

  What was your thinking on Humane League UK vs Humane League?

• david_reinstein 16 Nov 2024 19:00 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How would your pro­ject use ex­tra fund­ing? (Marginal Fund­ing Week 2024)

  I just wanted to make sure The Unjournal was eligible @Toby Tremlett🔹 . We made this post and tagged it but you state, “only projects that post or answer + message me are eligible for next week’s Donation Election”. I hadn’t seen that earlier, so I’m messaging you now. (Maybe other orgs also overlooked that?)

• david_reinstein 15 Nov 2024 22:36 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why EA needs Oper­a­tions Re­search: the sci­ence of de­ci­sion making

  The Unjournal (unjournal.org) commissioned the evaluation of one of the biosecurity-relevantpapers you mention (Barberio et al, 2023). See our evaluation package here, with links to each evaluation within.

  The evaluators generally agree about the importance and promise of this work, but also express substantial doubts about its credibility and usefulness. (They also make specific suggestions for improvements and extensions, as well as requests for clarification.) The evaluation manager echoes this, noting that the “limitations of the paper as it stands make it far less valuable than it could be.”

• david_reinstein 15 Nov 2024 22:18 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Fa­cil­i­tat­ing in­ter­na­tional la­bor mi­gra­tion via a digi­tal platform

  Note that The Unjournal has commissioned evaluations of Naidu et al (2023). See the summary and ratings here, and the linked evaluation reports. The second report offered substantial critiques and questions about the methods, interpretations, and context.