garymm
About a year and a half ago I seriously considered donating. I went through the screening and got approved to donate. During the screening process a doctor mentioned a study about post-operative pain, which I believe was this: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6790588/
IIUC, the study reports that ~1/20 donors reported chronic pain (that they self-report is due to the operation) years after the operation, and that those that do report a significantly decreased quality of life. The study doesn’t have any controls, so it’s possible that this is mostly due to the donors being mistaken about the pain being caused by the surgery.
That study gave me enough pause that I so far have not gone through with the donation. Curious to hear your thoughts on it.
Seems somewhat related to RadicalXChange stuff. Maybe look into that. They have some meetups and mailing lists.
Having read the account of B-59 in “Doomsday Machine”, I think it was higher risk for odds of nuclear weapons hitting the USA.
DC, New York, and San Francisco are among the highest-likelihood-of-being-hit-in-a-full-nuclear-exchange cities in the US
What’s the rationale behind New York and San Francisco?
If it’s because they are major population centers, what are reasonable estimates + rationale for P(target population | nuclear war)? I would have guessed attacking military sites (and in particular nuclear-related sites) would be much more likely, and I don’t think there are major military targets very close to San Francisco.
Agreed. Voting reform and forecasting are already getting attention from some in EA and should be integrated into this larger project IMO.
Relevant: “Towards a longtermist framework for evaluating democracy-related interventions”. In particular the discussion of “accuracy” and “liberalism”, but it doesn’t discuss the topic of “what gets voted on” besides liberalism.
Thanks very much for writing.
How many of these concerns would apply to the “Let markets veto proposed bills” proposal that you mentioned in your summary of Futarchy ?
Or variations on that where some non-Futarchy (e.g., republican) process is used to determine the set of policy proposals that are considered by the markets. You could see this as a dial, where the more demanding this proposal process is, the less scope there is for the markets to choose, and vice versa.
It seems to me that this would provide what you call a “sanity check” and avoid many cases of Goodhart’s law.
Some hybrid system like this seems promising to me.
I ended up:
Setting up a living trust.
Transferring the real estate to be owned by the trust.
Specifying in the trust that upon my death all assets should be donated to a donor-advised fund (DAF).
Specifying in the trust how the DAF funds should be donated.
I did this after verifying that DAFs do accept real estate. E.g., Schwab Charitable.
I’m in the USA and I own some real estate. I’d like to have it sold for the benefit of a charity after I die. If anyone has information on the best way to do this, please let me know, and perhaps incorporate it into the guide above.
Thanks!
The link in the first sentence with text “here” and target http://effectivealtruismhub.com/actions/leaving-money-to-charity-in-your-will redirects to the EA hub home page, and I can’t find any similar content on the EA Hub site.
If there is a more up-to-date resource on this, could you please update the link?
Otherwise, please remove it.
Thanks for sharing. I just started at Microsoft and will be reaching out to the mailing list to see how I can get involved.
One question / note:
Putting up posters across our large campus and dozens of building was both a lot of work and didn’t seem to get people to look into EA more.
Did you actually measure how many people took some action based on the posters?
For example, by putting a URL that went to a web page with analytics?If not, you might try that.
Sometimes it’s a bit counter-intuitive what things work. For example, from Rationally Speaking, I learned
that yard signs are probably an order of magnitude or two more cost- effective—honestly, between two to three is my 25 to 75 interval—more effective than the canvassing.
Prior to hearing that I’d assumed they were a big waste of money. So the same might be true of posters in Microsoft buildings.
As a consequentialist I care about the outcomes (i.e. welfare impacts) of collective decision making, not how democratic the decision making process is. It seems like some other commenters are saying that voting system reform increases human utility by satisfying voter’s preferences, but I think that assumes that voters know what’s good. I don’t think they do. Am I wrong that this assumption is being made? If it is being made, could someone point me to a good argument for it?
Perhaps a more promising project is focusing on changing what gets voted on, not on the exact voting system. For example Futarchy changes what gets voted on from “what policies to implement” to “what measurable goals to pursue”.
For a more familiar example, the USA’s First Amendment (and the cultural-political edifice that supports it) prevents the political process from enacting many things even if they have majority support, and it would continue to do so regardless of the voting system.
I’m not sure what the accepted term for this type of reform would be, maybe “constitutional reform”? Are there any organizations pursuing this type of reform? If not, is it because it’s been evaluated and found lacking along EA criteria?
Thanks!
What is MAPS? (It’s a hard term for Google)
I found this post and the transitive links useful: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/guvsD78ZXhfCaT7SH/the-unproven-and-unprovable-case-for-net-wild-animal
Thanks for writing this.
Our needs are also varied, and may not cleanly map to a well-recognized job profile (e.g. Security Analyst or Chief Information Security Officer)
What do you think is the main difference between the roles you’re describing and a Chief Information Security Officer role?
Our current best guess is that people who are interested should consider seeking security training in a top team in industry
Are there any industry roles that that anyone thinks would be particularly good or bad preparation?
I work at a large company and there are at least 10 different security-related teams, which from the outside seem to be doing fairly specialized work.
I think the educational attainment GWAS you mentioned in footnote 2 was released. How does that update your estimates and why?