Henry_Stanley

• Henry_Stanley 5 Apr 2019 11:14 UTC

  7 points

  on: Salary Ne­go­ti­a­tion for Earn­ing to Give

  Great idea. When get­ting a new tech job, Haseem’s ar­ti­cle was re­ally the only use­ful re­source out there for salary ne­go­ti­a­tions.

• Henry_Stanley 7 Sep 2018 12:23 UTC

  9 points

  on: Which piece got you more in­volved in EA?

  For me, the very first ‘EA’ thing I came across was from be­fore EA was a thing: Eliezer Yud­kowsky’s post on money as the unit of car­ing. https://​​www.less­wrong.com/​​posts/​​ZpDnRCeef2CLEFeKM/​​money-the-unit-of-caring

  It gen­uinely was a light­bulb mo­ment—the idea that do­ing the most good might mean mak­ing a bunch of money and giv­ing it to some­one who can do the good thing bet­ter than you can.

  And, maybe most im­por­tantly, it turned me on to ‘do­ing good’ in gen­eral. If I’m hon­est, I hadn’t re­ally con­sid­ered it as a pri­or­ity be­fore then. A cou­ple years later I took an 80K ca­reer con­sul­ta­tion, went into soft­ware en­g­ineer­ing, pledged to give away 10%+ and am now in the early stages of start­ing an EA org!

• Henry_Stanley 25 Aug 2018 13:12 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: Awe­some Effec­tive Altru­ism—a cu­rated list of EA resources

  I’m also in­ter­ested in any slightly un­ortho­dox re­sources—like, some­one com­ing to the move­ment for the first time might also want to see crit­i­cisms, un­usual points of view within the move­ment (e.g. nega­tive util­i­tar­i­anism), etc.

• Henry_Stanley 25 Aug 2018 13:11 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Denkenberger's comment on: Awe­some Effec­tive Altru­ism—a cu­rated list of EA resources

  Thanks, have added ’em.

• Henry_Stanley 25 Aug 2018 12:25 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: cscanlon_duplicate0.8895599732012125's comment on: Awe­some Effec­tive Altru­ism—a cu­rated list of EA resources

  Thanks, that’s been added.

Awe­some Effec­tive Altru­ism—a cu­rated list of EA resources

• Henry_Stanley 15 Jul 2018 23:17 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: Ac­countabil­ity bud­dies: a pro­posed system

  I like this a lot.

  Ran­dom plug: I know a lot of EAs (in­clud­ing my­self) use goal-and-task-track­ing tool Com­plice; you can as­sign an ac­countabil­ity part­ner who sees your progress (and you see theirs). You can also share a link like this that lets any­one get up­dates on your pub­lic goals, which could po­ten­tially be quite mo­ti­vat­ing.

• Henry_Stanley 14 Jul 2018 17:18 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: Im­pact In­vest­ing—A Vi­able Op­tion for EAs?

  I do want to share a cau­tion­ary tale about such in­vest­ing: in the UK, there are tax-effi­cient in­vest­ment ve­hi­cles called EISes and VCTs, which are de­signed to en­courage in­vestors to put money into some­what risky early-stage UK busi­nesses (and give big tax breaks as a re­sult).

  At one point, there were re­new­able en­ergy EIS/​VCT funds which seemed to give ex­cel­lent re­turns – but only be­cause the com­pa­nies in­volved were claiming sub­stan­tial, risk-free gov­ern­ment sub­sidies for re­new­ables schemes (“feed-in tar­iffs”). Even­tu­ally these schemes were scrapped, as were feed-in tar­iffs.

  So an un­wise im­pact in­vestor might have put money into such a scheme, made a nice profit, and thought they were do­ing so­cial good. In re­al­ity, the prof­its were just money taken from tax­pay­ers (FITs were funded by mak­ing en­ergy more ex­pen­sive for all house­holds), and im­pact (build­ing in­effi­cient, small-scale so­lar in a coun­try where so­lar en­ergy doesn’t make much sense[1]) prob­a­bly pretty min­i­mal.

  [1] - Peak en­ergy de­mand in the UK is in the win­ter when it’s cold­est and dark­est, so so­lar is ba­si­cally use­less here. Com­pare that to Cal­ifor­nia, where peak de­mand is when peo­ple switch on their A/​C dur­ing the sun­niest part of the day.

• Henry_Stanley 13 Jul 2018 18:00 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell_IV's comment on: Ideas for Im­prov­ing Fund­ing for In­di­vi­d­ual EAs, EA Pro­jects, and New EA Organizations

  Just a note on the EA Wiki (and on pro­ject aban­don­ment in gen­eral): lots of pro­jects seem to be re­ally badly run. The EA Wiki was offline for months be­cause of server is­sues, and un­til re­cently you couldn’t even reg­ister as a new user.

  I’m not sure EAs have a shorter at­ten­tion span than any­one else – I imag­ine most would maybe try a cou­ple of times to get onto the wiki and then just give up. That’s part of the rea­son I’m not wor­ried about pro­ject du­pli­ca­tion: so many efforts are half-baked that we shouldn’t al­low one party to have a monopoly on a par­tic­u­lar idea.

• Henry_Stanley 13 Jul 2018 17:57 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: John_Maxwell_IV's comment on: Ideas for Im­prov­ing Fund­ing for In­di­vi­d­ual EAs, EA Pro­jects, and New EA Organizations

  EA Ho­tel (writ­ing this com­ment from the ho­tel din­ing room)

  Ex­cit­ing stuff!

• Henry_Stanley 12 Jul 2018 1:50 UTC

  12 points

  in reply to: Denise_Melchin's comment on: Ideas for Im­prov­ing Fund­ing for In­di­vi­d­ual EAs, EA Pro­jects, and New EA Organizations

  Would be good to know who these peo­ple are to bet­ter co-or­di­nate the com­mu­nity’s efforts (and in­deed to see if they’re se­ri­ous en­deav­ours—I get the feel­ing a lot of EA pro­jects end up be­ing started and then aban­doned, so the fact that some­one is already work­ing on it shouldn’t nec­es­sar­ily stop oth­ers from do­ing so).

• Henry_Stanley 16 Jun 2018 22:54 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: michaelchen's comment on: Vi­su­al­is­ing an­i­mal agriculture

  That’s strange; what are you us­ing to view the page?

Vi­su­al­is­ing an­i­mal agriculture

• Henry_Stanley 6 Jun 2018 21:46 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: MichaelPlant's comment on: Ineffec­tive en­trepreneur­ship: post-mortem of Hippo, the hap­piness app that never quite was

  You’d make a repos­i­tory on e.g. GitHub and up­load the code there. Then other peo­ple can see it and sug­gest changes, or can fork (make a copy of) the repos­i­tory and start their own thing based off it.

• Henry_Stanley 25 Apr 2018 20:33 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: Please Take the 2018 Effec­tive Altru­ism Sur­vey!

  Prob­a­bly too late to change it, but for the ques­tion “how did you hear about this sur­vey?“, the EA Fo­rum isn’t men­tioned :P

• Henry_Stanley 17 Apr 2018 20:13 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: nalthaus's comment on: An­nounc­ing the new EA Wiki!

  You want to be go­ing here: https://​​wiki.eahub.org/​​wiki/​​Effec­tive_Altru­ism_Wiki

• Henry_Stanley 17 Apr 2018 20:13 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: An­nounc­ing the new EA Wiki!

  The wiki is now at https://​​wiki.eahub.org/​​wiki/​​Effec­tive_Altru­ism_Wiki.

• Henry_Stanley 9 Apr 2018 10:35 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: jpaddison's comment on: UK In­come Tax & Donations

  This is awe­some—thanks for writ­ing it up. I’m hop­ing it gets side­barred or oth­er­wise kept some­where for fu­ture refer­ence, and for fu­ture years!

  On the sub­ject of do­ing a tax re­turn: I’ve been us­ing TaxCalc for the last few years. It’s about £30 for a li­cence but cov­ers all sorts of com­plex sce­nar­ios and is su­per straight­for­ward—I’d recom­mend it.

• Henry_Stanley 6 Apr 2018 22:15 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Patrick's comment on: How to im­prove EA Funds

  If each fund man­ager’s time is val­ued at mil­lions or tens of mil­lions of dol­lars a year, the dis­count rate on the dona­tions held in a fund isn’t an over­whelming con­sid­er­a­tion. But that raises the ques­tion, why cre­ate the funds in the first place?

  Quite so. They seem to be stuck in a place where there’s enough money there for it to be waste­ful to let it just sit around, but not enough for it to be worth­while for the fund man­agers to make reg­u­lar dis­burse­ments.

• Henry_Stanley 6 Apr 2018 22:14 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Patrick's comment on: How to im­prove EA Funds

  US Trea­sury bonds yield 1.7% a year. That’s $18,700 a year in fore­gone revenue

  That’s the an­nu­al­ized re­turn on 3-month bonds, a short-term, zero-risk in­vest­ment. Set­ting up such an in­vest­ment would be triv­ial (and could surely be out­sourced).

  At the other ex­treme, you have the Wel­l­come Trust which holds Henry Wel­l­come’s en­dow­ment; their in­vest­ments have yielded an av­er­age of 14% per year since 1986. And those re­turns com­pound, too. As a re­sult, they’ve been able to give away much larger dis­burse­ments than if they’d sim­ply held the money in cash.