david_reinstein

Karma: 3,638

I’m the Founder and Co-director of The Unjournal;. W organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.

Previously I was a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, and before that n Economics lecturer/professor for 15 years.

I’m working to impact EA fundraising and marketing; see https://bit.ly/eamtt

And projects bridging EA, academia, and open science.. see bit.ly/eaprojects

My previous and ongoing research focuses on determinants and motivators of charitable giving (propensity, amounts, and ‘to which cause?’), and drivers of/barriers to effective giving, as well as the impact of pro-social behavior and social preferences on market contexts.

Podcasts: “Found in the Struce” https://anchor.fm/david-reinstein

and the EA Forum podcast: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast (co-founder, regular reader)

Twitter: @givingtools

david_reinstein 22 Jul 2024 10:19 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Falk Lieder’s comment on: Warren Buffett changes giving plans (for the worse)
I agree with you Falk. But to steelman Chris’ argument… perhaps a reputation for being critical of people who did so much good but failed to follow through on everything they promised could dissuade people from engaging with effective giving/pledges in the first place?

“Pivotal questions”: an Unjournal trial initiative

david_reinstein21 Jul 2024 16:57 UTC

26 points

0 comments7 min readEA link

david_reinstein 18 Jul 2024 16:16 UTC
2 points
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on: Announcing: Audio narrations of EA Forum posts
I still find this very useful, but I think the automation here is lagging a bit behind the technology in terms of realistic voices and pronunciation errors.

I’ve been hearing a lot better AI-generated narrations of books, news, etc., using the newest models. (I was even listening to an audiobook and didn’t realize it was AI for about 15 minutes until it made a glitch).

Any chance this could be upgraded?

david_reinstein 16 Jul 2024 23:08 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: cjp’s Quick takes
I think this is in the vein of what Jack Lewars is doing?

https://www.linkedin.com/company/ultraphilanthropy/

david_reinstein 16 Jul 2024 9:33 UTC
23 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Warren Buffett changes giving plans (for the worse)
Any ideas for ways to make a positive outreach to the Buffet trust… praising their past giving and discussing their ideals and strategy?

david_reinstein 3 Jul 2024 2:45 UTC
3 points
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on: Discussion Thread: AI Welfare Debate Week
I have doubts about whether digital or electronic information flows will yield valenced sentience, although I don’t rule it out.

But I have much stronger doubts about whether we can ever know what makes these ‘digital minds’ happy or sad, or even what goes in what direction.

david_reinstein 2 Jul 2024 17:35 UTC
41 points
17 ∶ 0
on: Center for Effective Aid Policy has shut down
Sorry to hear about the lack of success.

I’d strongly caution against overlearning that ‘this sort of thing cannot work’. The big thing that stands out to me is the issue of founder-fit:

Neither founder had experience from the development field, and spent the first many months learning the field and its many acronyms.

I have the impression that there are a lot of aligned people with this background and expertise looking to fill roles like this. Another attempt should be able to improve on this.

david_reinstein 20 Jun 2024 20:22 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: Do you want to work in the new Boston EA office at Harvard Square?
Any updates here?

david_reinstein 16 Jun 2024 19:38 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Larks’s comment on: Planning ‘resistance’ to illiberalism and authoritarianism
Sorry community tag was an accident. Will remove it.

Planning ‘resistance’ to illiberalism and authoritarianism

david_reinstein16 Jun 2024 17:21 UTC

29 points

2 comments2 min readEA link

(www.nytimes.com)

david_reinstein 25 Mar 2024 19:52 UTC
7 points
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on: Forecast Which Psychology Studies Replicate With Metaculus for the Transparent Replications Project
Amanda Metskas and Clare Harris will present on this today by the way—https://www.unjournal.org/news/transparent-replications-and-open-science

david_reinstein 16 Mar 2024 17:00 UTC
28 points
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on: New video: You’re richer than you realise
Great video, will share!
One question – in the interviews you incorporated, people stated that they thought it would be very expensive to save a life (£100k+) and even more (!) internationally.

Was this the norm? Because in the academic research I’ve seen people tend to state very low amounts, vastly underestimating the true (~£5k) cost. (This also seems to be happening iirc in my own ongoing work with Janek Kretschmer and Paul Smeets. Also why I was interested in seeing someone develop a “how much does it cost to save a life quiz and calculator”?)

If this £100k+ estimate was fairly normal in your street interviews, I’m wondering if you framed this in a particular way, or whether you stated something before asking them this question that made them think of these larger numbers. Potential useful to know how to frame this question for other research work and other contexts so that people are getting at ‘what we really mean by cost to save a life’.

david_reinstein 16 Mar 2024 16:26 UTC
6 points
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on: Maternal Health Initiative is Shutting Down
Thanks for this detailed report. It’s likely to be helpful to other organizations to understand the reasoning and evidence base behind this in considering whether to start or fund adjacent projects. Il
Some things that woukd also be nice com apologise if you already did this.
Can you share your data and code or spread sheets in case other researchers or founders want to revisit this? potentially this is something students and academic researchers would want to help you with.
You often report pre-values and a “lack of significant difference”. Of course, this could be driven by lack of statistical power in small samples. it would be helpful if you could report, confidence intervals for these. if you have the bandwidth, it would be helpful if you could do some equivalent test or even Bayesian analysis in a decision framework.

david_reinstein 11 Mar 2024 16:09 UTC
2 points
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on: Finding EA-relevant economics seminars: curated lists?
Someone reminded me about NE&EP Normative Economics and Economic Policy. This is a good and useful seminar series, and helpfully, they do post their topics.
It tends to be more focused on economic theory, but not exclusively so.

That said, I’m mainly looking for in-person opportunities atm, in part to help build and maintain ties and contacts, in part to have something that I actually do in ‘meat space’.

But I generally am very supportive of online or hybrid presentations and conferences. And if we were to make a curated list, we should include both.

[Question] Finding EA-relevant economics seminars: curated lists?

david_reinstein10 Mar 2024 23:23 UTC

19 points

3 comments1 min readEA link

david_reinstein 9 Mar 2024 16:43 UTC
3 points
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on: Some important research questions in economics
Thanks for this. We are trying to prioritize this work for evaluation, feedback and rating at Unjournal.org. Aiming to incorporate your suggestions soon.

david_reinstein 9 Mar 2024 0:04 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: david_reinstein’s comment on: Economics of Animal Welfare: Call for Abstracts
We now have a good team in this area (still looking for more).

We’re now particular interested in people submitting and suggesting research in this area for The Unjournal to evaluate.

david_reinstein 7 Mar 2024 22:33 UTC
2 points
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on: What do XPT forecasts tell us about AI risk?
I’m going through the hosted paper (“Forecasting Existential Risks”) and making some comments in hypothes.is (see here).

I first thought I saw something off, but now see that it’s because of the difference between total extinction risk vs catastrophic risk. For the latter, the superforecasters are not so different from the domain experts (about 2:1). Perhaps this could be emphasized more.

Putting this in a ‘data notebook/dashboard’ presentation could be helpful in seeing these distinctions.

david_reinstein 25 Feb 2024 0:07 UTC
8 points
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on: Can we help individual people cost-effectively? Our trial with three sick kids
Could this could be made even close to cost-effective and scaleable? If so, I think it has strong potential appeal. Perhaps not so much to hard-core rationalists and EAs, but as a bridge to making mainstream donation more effective. From this perspective, I’m more optimistic about your ‘hands on charity’ proposal.

I discussed this concept in a 2021 post a while back (see especially ‘my proposal sketch’). Wonder what you think.

david_reinstein 8 Feb 2024 20:10 UTC
2 points
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on: Diet that is vegan, frugal, time-efficient, ~evidence-based and ascetic: An example of a non-Huel EA diet?
Curious about the “rescue meat” thing.

My take is that buying “about-to-expire meat on discount when in the grocery store” incentivizes meat production less than buying expensive super-fresh premium meat.

On the other hand, stores that visibly see meat rotting on the shelves may be (emotionally?) inclined to reduce their meat orders in the future.

david_reinstein

“Pivotal ques­tions”: an Un­jour­nal trial ini­ti­a­tive

Plan­ning ‘re­sis­tance’ to illiber­al­ism and authoritarianism

[Question] Find­ing EA-rele­vant eco­nomics sem­i­nars: cu­rated lists?

“Pivotal questions”: an Unjournal trial initiative

Planning ‘resistance’ to illiberalism and authoritarianism

[Question] Finding EA-relevant economics seminars: curated lists?