Love your work!
Gavin Bishop
Karma: 31
I was literally starting to compile a list like this for myself personally. Thank you!
Bit late to the party and mostly meandering from the footnote but I’ve been thinking about this as well. +1 for the reference to Liu Cixin’s Three-Body problem series (Rememberance of Earth’s Past). Warning mild spoilers below although I’ve tried to keep them to a minimum.
While the physics used were super sci-fi, this has been the best book series I’ve read that really made me ‘feel’ the concepts of Longtermism and how they related to x-risk on a planetary scale. Few thoughts:Two bits I thought were particularly well done were a) the experiences of those waking up from hibernation tech (they woke up to a world significantly different than they predicted, and you could feel their disorientation) and b) the Australia chapter where you really get a sense of how horrific worst case x-risks might be
The speculative fiction on how society might respond to lots of these existential challanges also seems like good material to be able to reference and try to find solutions to in a common cultural language. E.g. as discussed here (Including referencing how a particular scenario is not like the one described).
The fact that it is written by one of the most popular Chinese Fiction writers seems like a major positive in terms of providing common ground for international cultural common ground between representatives of superpowers.
A counterpoint to promoting this may be his personal comments on politics in modern China, but I didn’t get the impression that his writing in the series was problematically anti-democratic.
I don’t want to update too much on something like ‘this is a representative view of how Chinese society tends to think about the long-term future’. If anyone has any insight on this I’d love to know.
Would it be a good idea to promote reading Liu Cixin’s books on these merits above? How does it compare to other longtermist fiction for Instilling Cultural Longtermism?
I’m unsure about the tractability and desireability of a date-on-consititution-change. My major crux would be how much bipartisan support you could get.
This is awesome! Is there a page somewhere that collates the results of a bunch of internal forecasting by the end of the grant period? I’d be interested
Thought this was excellent. Great range of content and super high quality. One of my favourite 80k episodes of all time
This was a great read, illuminating and well-paced. Thanks!
The WHO has some good rankings of disease burden. They have different rankings for DALYs, YLLs and YLD. For example, back and neck pain is globally the leading cause of years lived with disability, but neonatal conditions and ischaemic heart disease cause the most DALYs. I imagine you could combine this with some other table that quantifies research effort and another which quantifies investment in that particular cause area.
Does anyone know of a good place to find them?
This is great. Was looking for stuff similar to Scott Alexander’s ‘Every Bay area house party’
Just adding my comment to +1 this one. Great articulation of an intuition I’ve had as well.
Hello Will very excited to read the book! My question however is about fire raves. How do you run them and what are your tips for making them the best experience they can be?
I’m one of the organising members of EA Dunedin in New Zealand and I’m planning on organising one for our group. I have a fair bit of experience organising bonfires/campfires but these tend to be the rather chill sort, maybe with a bluetooth speaker for some people to dance.
Bunch of questions: Feel free to just reply to whichever one you want and ignore the others :)
What are some key things to bring these to the next level? What’s an underrated aspect that people tend to forget about? What are the highlights of your night?
For example I’ve learned from organising house parties that it’s good to have the dancing area out of direct line of sight of the table with the food on it. So people dancing don’t get self-conscious about people just standing and eating and watching them. Any insight would be awesome (also welcome comments from others with fire-rave experience)!
This is an excellent project and an excellent post. Big kudos for making it happen. Also, thanks for introducing me to the term visual knowledge projects. I’d never heard of the specific term before and have always thought these sorts of visual maps are fantastic.
I’ve been trying to think of any important topic areas which have been missed and the first one that springs to mind is one on rational and compassionate/altruistic interpersonal communication. I really enjoyed Nonviolent Communication but I’m not sure it’s our best bet due to a lack of randomised studies and some of the vibe. Maybe something on CBT like Feeling Good? Although this may now be drifting out of EA scope.
Secondly, for anyone who has enjoyed Factfulness by Hans Rosling or anything by Steven Pinker, I’d recommend this video essay for some strong counterpoints. I learned a lot and it’s made me more cautious regarding the global application of ‘new optimism’.
Finally, here’s another of my favourite visual knowledge projects: The Map of Philosophy by Carneades.org
I’m noticing I don’t have a very good mental model for this (if I assume you’re interested primarily in maximising effective GHD donations). Would love other people’s insight.
I saw that OP’s bar for funding was about ~$50 per DALY averted in Oct 2023. Excerpt from OP below:
Some more questions:
How do GiveWell’s current top charity recommendations each sit at $/DALY-averted?
Does that mean that we can expect a donation to GiveWell to be buying DALY-aversions for >$50? (But less than what?) (I know that doing this calculation is not always a great idea, but keen to know how OP and GiveWell are thinking about this if they have)
What are reasonable alternatives to consider in this space? (I’m aware of other great non-GHD donation opportunities)
Re:fully funded, my vague mental model is they have a list of projects, ordered in some way, and then they fill till they run out of money +/- saving for future opportunities. Would love to know whether this is accurate.
Cheers for the practical post question.