London GWWC group co-lead: https://www.givingwhatwecan.org/london
Organiser of the EY Effective Altruism workplace group and EA London Quarterly Review coworking sessions.
Original EA Taskmaster https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9qcnrRD3ZHSwibtBC/ea-taskmaster-game
In my day job, I’m an accountant turned product person in tax technology.
See also the Payroll Giving (UK) or GAYE—EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org) page which it is the top google result for “Effective Altruism Payroll Giving”. It made sense for me to update since I am an accountant and have experience trying to get this done at my workplace.
Did I need to make a post about something unrelated to do that?
Should we be making it so difficult for users with an EA forum account to make updates to the forum wikis?
I imagine the platform vision for the EA forum is to be the “Wikipedia for do-gooders” and make it useful as a resource for people working out the best ways to do good. For example, when you google “Effective Altruism AI Safety” on incognito mode—the first result is the forum topic on AI safety: AI safety—EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org)
I was chatting to @Rusheb about this who has spent the last year upskilling to transition into AI Safety from software development. He had some great ideas for links (ie. new 80k guides, site that had links for newbies or people making the transition from software engineering)
Ideally someone who had this experience and opinions on what would be useful on a landing page for AI Safety should be able to suggest this on the wiki page (like you can do on Wikipedia with the caveat that you can be overruled). However, he doesn’t have the forum karma to do that and the tooltip explaining that was unclear on how to get the karma to do it.
I have the forum karma to do it but I don’t think I should get the credit—I didn’t have the AI safety knowledge—he did. In this scenario, the forum has lost out on some free improvements to its wiki plus an engaged user who would feel “bought in”. Is there a way to “lend him” my karma?
I got it from posting about EA Taskmaster which shouldn’t make me an authority on AI Safety.
Agree and thanks for writing this up Nick!
I like 80k’s recent shift to pushing it’s career guide again (what initially brought me into EA—the writing is so good!) and focusing on skill sets.
Really appreciate those diagrams—thanks for making them! I agree and think there are serious risks from EA being taken over as a field by AI safety.
The core ideas behind EA are too young and too unknown by most of the world for them to be strangled by AI safety—even if it is the most pressing problem.
Pulling out a quote from MacAskill’s comment (since a lot of people won’t click)
I’ve also experienced what feels like social pressure to have particular beliefs (e.g. around non-causal decision theory, high AI x-risk estimates, other general pictures of the world), and it’s something I also don’t like about the movement. My biggest worries with my own beliefs stem around the worry that I’d have very different views if I’d found myself in a different social environment. It’s just simply very hard to successfully have a group of people who are trying to both figure out what’s correct and trying to change the world: from the perspective of someone who thinks the end of the world is imminent, someone who doesn’t agree is at best useless and at worst harmful (because they are promoting misinformation).
In local groups in particular, I can see how this issue can get aggravated: people want their local group to be successful, and it’s much easier to track success with a metric like “number of new AI safety researchers” than “number of people who have thought really deeply about the most pressing issues and have come to their own well-considered conclusions”.
One thing I’ll say is that core researchers are often (but not always) much more uncertain and pluralist than it seems from “the vibe”.
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What should be done? I have a few thoughts, but my most major best guess is that, now that AI safety is big enough and getting so much attention, it should have its own movement, separate from EA. Currently, AI has an odd relationship to EA. Global health and development and farm animal welfare, and to some extent pandemic preparedness, had movements working on them independently of EA. In contrast, AI safety work currently overlaps much more heavily with the EA/rationalist community, because it’s more homegrown.
If AI had its own movement infrastructure, that would give EA more space to be its own thing. It could more easily be about the question “how can we do the most good?” and a portfolio of possible answers to that question, rather than one increasingly common answer — “AI”.
At the moment, I’m pretty worried that, on the current trajectory, AI safety will end up eating EA. Though I’m very worried about what the next 5-10 years will look like in AI, and though I think we should put significantly more resources into AI safety even than we have done, I still think that AI safety eating EA would be a major loss. EA qua EA, which can live and breathe on its own terms, still has huge amounts of value: if AI progress slows; if it gets so much attention that it’s no longer neglected; if it turns out the case for AI safety was wrong in important ways; and because there are other ways of adding value to the world, too. I think most people in EA, even people like Holden who are currently obsessed with near-term AI risk, would agree.
The OECD are currently hiring for a few potentially high-impact roles in the tax policy space:
The Centre for Tax Policy and Administration (CTPA)
Executive Assistant to the Director and Office Manager (closes 6th October)
Senior programme officer (closes 28th September)
Head of Division—Tax Administration and VAT (closes 5th October)
Head of Division—Tax Policy and Statistics (closes 5th October)
Head of Division—Cross-Border and International Tax (closes 5th October)
Team Leader—Tax Inspectors Without Borders (closes 28th September)
I know less about the impact of these other areas but these look good:
Trade and Agriculture Directorate (TAD)
Head of Section, Codes and Schemes—Trade and Agriculture Directorate (closes 25th September)
Programme Co-ordinator (closes 25th September)
International Energy Agency (IEA)
Clean Energy Technology Analysts (closes 24th September)
Modeller and Analyst – Clean Shipping & Aviation (closes 24th September)
Analyst & Modeller – Clean Energy Technology Trade (closes 24th September)
Data Analyst—Temporary (closes 28-09-2023)
Financial Action Task Force
I agree and this is why I’m in favour of a Big Tent approach to EA. This risk comes from a lack of understanding about the diversity of thought within EA and that it isn’t claiming to have all the answers. There is a danger that poor behaviour from one part of the movement can impact other parts.
Broadly EA is about taking a Scout Mindset approach to doing good with your donations, career and time. Individual EAs and organisations can have opinions on what cause areas need more resources at the margin but “EA” can’t—it isn’t a person, it’s a network.
I really liked this post How CEA’s communications team is thinking about EA communications at the moment — EA Forum (effectivealtruism.org) from @Shakeel Hashim and hope that whatever happens in terms of shake ups at CEA—communications and clarity around the EA brand are prioritised.
Hi—this seemed cool. Is there an update on where this got to?
Could you say more about the strong evidence beyond the statements by Bill Gates?
See my other comment
I don’t think Bill’s statement there is particularly fair—MSF aren’t pushing for the price to be “zero”, they pushing for reduced profit margins since the tiered pricing doesn’t go far enough.
I’d like to see more evidence of this deterrence effect beyond statements by Bill Gates who has a history of controversy over his business practices.
Hey—this was interesting, thanks for writing up!
Would you consider adding more tags to this post so it’s more findable for potentially interested folks? Adding details to wikis is also really helpful.
I’m not an expert but this sounds like it could have an impact on: climate change, indoor air quality, engineering.
Also have you come across https://www.highimpactengineers.org/?
Yeah aligning incentives here seems hard and tbh I don’t think it’s a sustainable option to have advocacy campaigns targeting pharma companies for every global health issue.
It was interesting to read about Advance Market Commitments from this piece (https://worksinprogress.co/issue/why-we-didnt-get-a-malaria-vaccine-sooner/#advance-market-commitments)
Quoting (on mobile so can’t seem to do the formatting):
A standard Advance Market Commitment (AMC) is a promise to subsidize the future purchase of a new vaccine in large quantities – if it’s invented – in return for the firm charging customers close to marginal cost (that is, with only a small mark-up).
Letʼs break it down. The subsidy incentivizes research by compensating innovators for their fixed cost investments in R&D and manufacturing capacity. The commitments to buy a certain quantity at a certain price ensure the vaccine is affordable and widely available. The subsidy is conditional on a co-payment (this is the part that is close to marginal cost) from governments in low and middle income countries – without it, the developer receives nothing. This incentivizes firms to develop vaccines countries will actually use, not just those that meet technical specifications.
So while patents trade-off innovation incentives with affordable access, AMCs help us achieve both. And the price strategy means that AMCs encourage deployment at scale in a way that most prizes do not. AMCs are a kind of inversion to typical ‘push funding’ – they instead ‘pull’ innovation towards a goal by paying for outputs and outcomes. They don’t require funders to choose which research efforts to back in advance – they can just commit to rewarding the innovations that succeed. And they’ve been successful at doing so in the past.
Potentially. However, Danaher’s current market share in LMIC can be traced to public funding and buy-down agreement with WHO and Unitaid in 2012 on the basis of projected annual sales of 4.7 million tests (number that was quickly eclipsed). There are potential competitors but they won’t LMIC market before 2024 and gaining market share will take years. Therefore, Cepheid will remain the dominant supplier of critical rapid molecular tests for LMICs for the next few years.
The campaign is advocating that they reduce their profit margin which given the potential sales volumes will still likely make this a profitable outcome. I am pretty unconvinced that it would serious decision relevant factor.
If you have evidence or case studies beyond this post that this has seriously influenced a for profits decision to commercialise in LMIC then I’d love to read it.
I started defaulting to saying people trying to do EA—less person focused more action focused
Hi Alyssa—I run the EA group for EY. Happy to chat :)
Really enjoyed reading this—thanks for posting!
Agree! This also seems like a good place to plug that we’re hosting a picnic for GWWC pledgees, effective givers and the pledge curious on Sunday 30th July in Regents Park, London details: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/events/xPk9y8GJfTReRRvh5/giving-what-we-can-social-picnic-london
That seems reasonable—I think the target audience for effective giving is much bigger.
The call-to-action is really what I’m getting at so pleased to see that ☺️
I think MoreGood would be a great rebrand for the forum!
Hi all—please join this WhatsApp community if you’re planning to come! All announcements will be there:
Hmmm I’m not being as prescriptive as that. Maybe there is a better solution to this specific problem—maybe requiring someone with higher karma to confirm the suggestion? (original person gets the credit)