Giles

• Giles 12 Jun 2020 1:22 UTC

  22 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EAGxVir­tual Un­con­fer­ence (Satur­day, June 20th 2020)

  A Mindful Approach to Tackling those Yucky Tasks You’ve Been Putting Off

  For many of us, procrastination is a problem. This can take many forms, but we’ll focus on relatively simple tasks that you’ve been putting off long-term.

  Epistemic status: speculative, n=1 stuff.

  
  

  Yucky Tasks

  Yucky tasks may be thought of several ways:

  • things you’ve been putting off

  • tasks which generate complex, negative emotions.

  • that vague thing that you know is there but it’s hard to get a grip on and you’re all like uhggggg

  
  

  The connection to EA?

  EA is not about following well-trodden paths. We’re all trying to do something different and new, and stepping out of comfort zones.

  • donating big sums of money to unusual causes

  • seeing the world through an unusual lens

  • reaching out to people we don’t know

  • planning our careers and our finances

  • and more

  • all while staying organized in our personal lives

  For some of us, we may be exceptionally talented or productive in some domains, but find some of the tasks elusive or hard to get a grip on.

  
  

  So what happens?

  Most commonly avoidance. This can go on until there’s some kind of shift: maybe we avoid something until it becomes super urgent, or maybe we just wait until our feelings around it become clearer.

  Forcing ourselves to jump right in, tackling the task “forcefully” using all our available willpower. Though this can get the job done it can be unpleasant and unsustainable—we’ll remember all that negativity for the next time, and thus make the next task more difficult. Especially disruptive when working with others.

  
  

  What’s an alternative?

  This talk is about discovering and mapping our mental landscapes surrounding a problem. Tasks, and their associated thoughts and emotions, can be mapped out in a rich web. Often, different sub-tasks will be associated with different emotions, and seeing this laid out can help with getting our emotional bearings, as well as practical problem-solving.

  The result is unpacking a complex, muddied anxiety or resentment into something cleaner and truer. We’re still at early stages but we’re hoping to build this technique out into something robust that can help those of us in the EA movement overcome the blocks to personal effectiveness.

  ------------

  (I would like to be part of the late session)

• Giles 2 Jan 2015 3:23 UTC

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The per­spec­tives on effec­tive al­tru­ism we don’t hear

  I’ve been talking a lot to an EA outsider, and she offers the following opinions (which I’m expressing in my own words; she hopes to flesh this out into a blog post at some point).

  1) EA is arrogant

  • The name “effective altruism”

  • The name “effective altruist”

  • The attitude towards most charities and their supporters

  • The attitude of the Friendly AI people

  2) EA is individualistic. It values individual wellbeing, not (for their own sake):

  • Art and culture

  • The environment

  • Communities

  3) EA is top-down

  • Orgs like GiveWell call the shots

  • Charities aren’t based in the countries they’re trying to help

  • Donors are armchair-based, don’t visit the communities they’re trying to help

  4) EA promotes incremental change, not systemic change

  • Charity rather than activism

  • Part of the capitalist system; money-focussed

  5) EA is somewhat one-size-fits-all

  • donors have particular causes that are important to them

  • art patrons favour particular artists; they aren’t trying to “maximize the total amount of art in existence”

  6) Many consequences are hidden

  • If you’re a teacher, how do you know what effect you ultimately have on your students?

  7) How do you assess the actual needs of the communities you’re trying to help?

  • Have you asked them?

  8) The whole Friendly AI thing is just creepy.

  • If it is real, it means a tiny elite is making huge decisions for everyone without consulting people if that’s what they want

Stuck? Talk to an EA Buddy!

Ia­son Gabriel writes: What’s Wrong with Effec­tive Altruism

• Giles 5 Dec 2014 3:55 UTC

  8 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Open Thread 6

  I was having a look at the total budgets for various EA orgs to see what the overall balance looks like:

  Meta (3.8%)

  • GW 2.7%

  • ACE 0.2%

  • 80K 0.2%

  • GWWC 0.2%

  • LYCS 0.5%

  Poverty (79.6%)

  • AMF 7.6%

  • GD 54.9%

  • SCI 9.8%

  • DtW 7.3%

  Animal (11.2%)

  • AE 0.9%

  • THL 1.5%

  • MFA 8.8%

  xrisk (5.4%)

  • MIRI 5.4%

  I was unable to find figures for FHI, FLI, CSER, GCRI or CFAR so the meta and xrisk portions are going to be larger than this. Also note that, along with usual caveats, these figures are probably wrong as I wasn’t putting much care into them. Let me know if I should tidy this up a bit and write a post on it or whether the whole exercise is a waste of time.

• Giles 10 Feb 2017 6:48 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: In­tro­duc­ing the EA Funds

  This is great!! Pretty sure I’d be giving more if it felt more like a coordinated effort and less like I have to guess who needs the money this time.

  I guess my only concern is: how to keep donors engaged with what’s going on? It’s not that I wouldn’t trust the fund managers, it’s more that I wouldn’t trust myself to bother researching and contributing to discussions if donating became as convenient as choosing one box out of 4.

• Giles 27 Sep 2015 4:49 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Why we need more meta

  I’m helping prepare a spreadsheet listing organizations and their budgets, which at some point will be turned into a pretty visualization...

  Anyway, according to this sheet, meta budgets total around $4.2m (that’s $2.1m GiveWell, $0.8m CEA and $0.8m CFAR, plus a bunch of little ones). That’s more than “a couple”, but direct charities’ budgets total $52m so we’re still shy of 10%.

  (Main caveats to this data: It’s not all for exactly the same year, so anything which is taking off exponentially will skew it. Also I haven’t checked the data particularly carefully).

  I’ve also been counting x-risk organizations as not meta. That one’s a bit ambiguous—on the one hand they do a lot of “priorities research and marketing”, but on the other hand there isn’t really an object-level tier of organizations beneath them that works in the same areas.

  As to what self-identified effective altruists are up to: a quick look at the 2014 EA survey only yields number of donations to each organization, not amount of money… but if we go with that, 20% of the donations are to organizations I’ve counted as “meta”.

  So my working conclusion would be that if you favour a 50% split across the community, you’re looking good for putting all your eggs in meta. If you favour a 10-20% split, you may need to look a bit more carefully.

  A final note of caution: you can only push in one direction. If you favoured a 20% meta split, and (just suppose it turned out that) only 5% of donations in your reference class went to meta, it doesn’t automatically mean that you should donate to meta. There might be some other category, e.g. direct animal welfare charities, which were also under-represented according to your ideal pie. It’s then up to you to decide which needs increasing more urgently.

• Giles 20 Jan 2015 3:11 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Jan­uary Open Thread

  I was reading The Phatic and the Antic-Inductive on Slate Star Codex.

  Why’s this relevant?

  Birthday and Christmas charity fundraisers of course!

  There is a sense in which the concept of a birthday fundraiser is anti-inductive—if they worked, and everyone realised they worked, then a lot more people would be doing them and they wouldn’t work so well any more.

  But actually running a fundraiser feels more like phatic communication. You’re really communicating very little information about the charity you want people to give money to, but people seem to appreciate it and (as far as I know) very rarely get mad.

  So is there some kind of lesson here that in some situations, one mindset is better, in other situations a different mindset is better… but always to remember that the other person may have a very different mindset to yourself?

• Giles 25 Dec 2014 19:12 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: How I Raised $5010.32 for AMF and How You Can Too!

  Again, the point of this is to make genuine connections and re-connections, not just to use your friends as a means to an end of fundraising.

  If this whole “fundraising” thing is just a clever ruse to get EA people to reconnect with their extended network of friends, I heartily approve!

Anti Publi­ca­tion Bias Registry

Another fundraiser report

• Giles 21 Jul 2015 20:14 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ia­son Gabriel writes: What’s Wrong with Effec­tive Altruism

  I think that the priority/​ultrapoverty strand of this argument is one place where you can’t ignore nonhuman animals. My intuition says that they’re among the worst off, and relatively cheap to help.

• Giles 6 Jan 2015 1:22 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Out­side Crit­ics of Effec­tive Altruism

  Another criticsm: the movement isn’t as transparent as you might expect. (Remember, GiveWell was originally the Clear Fund—started up not necessarily because existing charitable foundations were doing the wrong thing, but because they were too secretive).

  When compiling this table of orgs’ budgets, I found that even simple financial information was difficult to obtain from organizations’ websites. I realise I can just ask them—and I will—but I’m thinking about the underlying attitude. (As always, I may be being unfair).

  Also, what Leverage Research are up to is anybody’s guess.

• Giles 14 Dec 2014 17:54 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Generic good ad­vice: do in­tense ex­er­cise often

  Beeminder got me exercising. I recommend it if you have a tendency to put things off.

• Giles 2 Dec 2014 22:44 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ideas for new ex­per­i­men­tal EA pro­jects you could fund!

  The idea of regularly talking to GWWC members makes me want to plug the EA Buddy System. The goals are much the same, it’s just decentralized and volunteer-based. Is it worth coordinating with GWWC on this, e.g. coming up with a set of suggestions that EA buddies can talk about with GWWC members?

• Giles 27 Sep 2015 5:10 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Giles’s comment on: Why we need more meta

  I can’t emphasize the exponential growth thing enough. A look at the next page on this forum shows CEA wanting to hire another 13 people. Meanwhile GiveWell were boasting of having grown to 18 full time staff back in March; now they have 30.

  But the direct charities are growing like crazy too! It all makes it very easy to be off by a factor of 2 (and maybe I am in my above reasoning) simply by using out of date figures. Anyone business-minded know about the sort of reasoning and heuristics to use under growth conditions?

• Giles 6 Jan 2015 1:04 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: TLYCS Pam­phlet­ing Pilot Program

  Also, have you got in touch with the good people at Charity Science?

• Giles 2 Jan 2015 3:00 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: AlasdairGives’s comment on: The per­spec­tives on effec­tive al­tru­ism we don’t hear

  I wouldn’t write it off. These reasons may apply to a lot of people, even if they wouldn’t express them in those words. I found point 2 particularly interesting.

• Giles 24 Nov 2014 1:58 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: When should an Effec­tive Altru­ist be veg­e­tar­ian?

  To me, four important effective altruism barriers are cognitive dissonance, akrasia, arrogance and value erosion. More precisely:

  • cognitive dissonance as deliberately choosing to be nasty so as to gain some small amount of fungible resource which can be spent on effective charity

  • akrasia as choosing not to give because somehow you don’t feel like it, hoarding your money because you can always spend it later

  • arrogance as believing that because you have access to and trust in a specific piece of knowledge (in this case charity effectiveness), you will have vastly more effect on the world than an average person

  • value erosion as future selves deciding they don’t care about animals after all.

  I think cognitive dissonance and value erosion work similarly here, and both point in favour of veganism.

  Arrogance is a complicated one because it might actually be true that you have a huge positive effect compared to an average person (it’s kind of what we’re striving for). But actually alieving it might be problematic, and it might make sense to just be a vegan and unplug your phone chargers when not in use in order to feel more normal.

  Akrasia could work both ways—there’s a possibility that veganism could “use up” your charitableness, which would certainly be a bad thing. But on the other hand veganism might help you integrate socially with other vegan activists, which might be a motivating factor to give.

• Giles 21 Jul 2015 20:03 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ia­son Gabriel writes: What’s Wrong with Effec­tive Altruism

  One thing I find interesting about all the thought experiments is that they assume a one donor, many recipient model. That is, the morality of each situation is analyzed as if a single agent is making the decision.

  Reality is many donors, many recipients and I think this affects the analysis of the examples. Firstly because donors influence each others’ behaviour, and secondly because moral goods may aggregate on the donor end even if they don’t aggregate on the recipient end. I’ll try and explain with some examples:

  Two villages (a): each village currently receives 50% of the donations from other donors. Enough of the other donors care about equality that this number will stay at 50% whichever one you donate to (because they’ll donate to whichever village receives less than 50% of the funds). So whether you care about equality or not, as a single donor your decision doesn’t matter either way.

  Two villages (b): each village currently receives 50% of the donations from other donors, but this time it’s because the other donors are donating carelessly. Moral philosophers have decided that the correct allocation (balancing equality with overall benefit) is for one village to receive 60% of donations and the other to receive 40%. As a relatively small donor, your moral duty then is to give all your money to one village, to try and nudge that number up as close to 60% as you can.

  Medicine (a): Philosophers have decided the ideal distribution is 90% condoms and 10% ARVs. Depending what the actual distribution is, it might be best to put all your money into funding condoms, or all your money into funding ARVs, and only if it’s already right on the mark should you favour a ⁹⁰⁄₁₀ split.

  I don’t think the Ultrapoverty, Sweatshop and Participation examples are affected by this particular way of thinking though.

  I just get the feeling that something like consequentialism will emerge, even if you start off with very different premises, once you take into account other donors giving to overlapping causes but with different agendas. Or at least, that this would be so for as long as people identifying with EA remain a tiny minority.