I’m a program officer on the AI governance team at Open Philanthropy.
Jason Schukraft
Karma: 2,959
The person who replaces me has all my same skills but in addition has many connections to policymakers, more management experience, and stronger quantitative abilities than I do.
Hi James, thanks for your question. The climate change work currently on our research calendar includes:
A look at how climate damages are accounted for in various integrated assessment models
A cost effectiveness analysis of anti-deforestation interventions
A review of the landscape of climate change philanthropy
An analysis of how scalable different carbon offsetting programs are
This is also motivated by having a (still very young) kid we’re thinking about how to eventually engage with our giving.
I have a four-year-old and a six-year-old. We discuss our giving with them regularly. When my daughter turned five, we started giving her a weekly allowance with the strong expectation (though no outright requirement) that she would make her own charitable donation every December. During the giving process, we talk a lot about her values and offer guidance, but the ultimate amount and destination of the donation is up to her. Last year she donated $10 (about 10% of her total allowance) to The Nature Conservancy. It will be interesting to see how her decision making evolves over time. (Unfortunately, she seems to be quite swayed by the fact that The Nature Conservancy sent her a calendar!)
Hi tcelferact,
I have a PhD in philosophy, and I’m a senior research manager at Rethink Priorities. If you want to discuss PhD applications, shoot me a PM and we can set up a call. My main piece of advice is to optimize the writing sample for getting accepted to whatever programs you think are the best fit for you. Optimizing that metric might result in a much different writing sample than trying to find an actual good idea and writing about that.
Despite the skepticism about charter cities that Dave and I express in the report, I would be comfortable recommending @effective_jobs retweet openings at Charter Cities Institute. There are plenty of folks in the EA community who would be a good fit for CCI, and it seems to me that an aggregator like @effective_jobs should lean toward casting a wider rather than narrower net.
Hi Alex,
Thanks for your comment. I’ve written a bit about the potential relevance of intelligence and emotional complexity to capacity for welfare here. But I share your skepticism about their relevance to moral status. I’m reminded of this comic:
Intervention report: Agricultural land redistribution
Intervention Report: Charter Cities
Global lead exposure report
Someone could say that they will torture animals unless vegans give them money, I guess. I think this doesn’t happen for multiple reasons.
Interestingly, there is at least one instance where this apparently has happened. (It’s possible it was just a joke, though.) There was even a law review article about the incident.
I’m pretty sure the Forum uses the same karma vote-power as LessWrong.
Great, thanks! Just added it.
I do think we have been able to acquire talent that would not have been otherwise counterfactually acquired by other organizations.
As an additional data point, I can report that I think it’s very unlikely that I would currently be employed by an EA organization if Rethink Priorities didn’t exist. I applied to Rethink Priorities more or less on a whim, and the extent of my involvement with the EA community in 2018 (when I was hired) was that I was subscribed to the EA newsletter (where I heard about the job) and I donated to GiveWell top charities. At the time, I had completely different career plans.
A lot depends on what constitutes a cause area and what counts as analysis. My own rough and tentative view is that at some level of generality (which could plausibly be called “cause area”), we can use heuristics to compare broad categories of interventions. But in terms of actual rigorous analysis, cause area is certainly not the right unit, and, furthermore, as a matter of empirical fact, there aren’t really any research organizations (including Rethink Priorities, where I work) that take cause area to be the appropriate unit of analysis.
Very curious to hear the thoughts of others, as I think this is a super important question!
If you haven’t seen it yet, you might find this report on the viability of cultured meat helpful. Open Philanthropy commissioned the report.
Hi David,
Thanks for the suggestions! Anyone who works on this topic in the future should probably investigate them further. My current rough impression is that, even if there were a market for the stubble, the process of baling the stubble for transport and sale would either be time-and-labor intensive or require equipment that the average farmer in the region can’t afford. Because of the nature of the crop cycle, farmers are under intense pressure to clear the stubble quickly, hence the appeal of stubble burning.
Hey Harrison, I think the short answer is that it’s just a really messy situation and any potential solution that has a shot at improving on the status quo has to take political reality into account.
Hey Harrison,
I’m also not knowledgeable about Indian politics, but it seems pretty clear that Indian farmers wield considerable political influence. (See the reaction to the introduction of three market-friendly farm laws for the most recent demonstration of this power.) I’d like to think political compromise is possible, but it’s hard to know which compromises are feasible.
Fortunately, it appears that many of the potential solutions to stubble burning are essentially win-win. Although stubble burning is an effective way to deal with crop residue in the short term, the practice is pretty bad for the soil. Many of the alternatives to stubble burning would probably raise yields in the long-run.
One of the authors of the charter cities report here. I’ll just add a few remarks to clarify how we intended the quoted passage. I’ll highlight three disagreements with the interpretation offered in the original post.
(1) We absolutely care whether neocolonialism is bad (or, if neocolonialism is inherently bad, we care about whether charter cities would instantiate neocolonialism). However, we only had ~100 research hours to devote to this topic, so we bracketed that concern for the time being. These sort of prioritization decisions are difficult but necessary in order to produce research outputs in a timely manner.
(2) The neocolonial critique of charter cities is well-known in the relevant circles, though it comes in many varieties. (See, among others, van de Sand 2019 and citations therein.) We probably should have included a footnote with examples. The fact that we didn’t engage with the critique more extensively (or really, at all) is some indication of how seriously we take the argument. We could have been more explicit about that.
(3) I’m not entirely sure why PR-risk needs to be excluded from cost effectiveness analysis (it’s just another downside), though I’m not opposed in practice to doing this. I agree that there are ways to mitigate PR risk. At no point in the report did we claim that PR risks ought to disqualify charter cities (or any other intervention) from funding.