Boston-based, NAO Lead, GWWC board member, parent, musician. Switched from earning to give to direct work in pandemic mitigation. Married to Julia Wise. Speaking for myself unless I say otherwise. Full list of EA posts: jefftk.com/ânews/âea
Jeff Kaufman đ¸
Karma: 17,499
Thanks! Iâm glad this has 1 + 0 + 1 + 1 = Ď â 1, but Iâm going to need to go read more to understand why ;)
This is really neat!
You say âremoving a single unit of value from a person in the latter option ⌠is worse by 1 unit as we would hopeâ, but donât the ordering effects get very tricky?
For example, imagine everyone ever to live has a lifetime utility of 1, population size is constant, and so the utility of all future people is 1 + 1 + 1 + 1 ⌠= Ď. But if I took some living person today and zeroed out their utility, then we might have 1 + 0 + 1 + 1 ⌠which is still Ď in your formulation, no? And weâd prefer it to be Ď â 1?
longform Youtubers can charge much more than shortform and so on
Do you know what this looks like, roughly, on a per-minute basis?
Is the value of video really proportional to length? I think Iâd rather 100M people watch a 2min intro than 4M people watch a 1hr deep dive, holding everything else constant. In general I expect diminishing marginal returns to longer content, as you say the most important things first.
It doesnât seem to me like your methodology is able to really support your claim that the top cost-effectiveness is not short-form videos; instead thatâs something that falls pretty directly out of the metric you chose.
I like the framing, and think this is important stuff, but I agree with Linch that the AI-flavor is grating and makes me wonder how much you stand by the wordsâif I object to a specific point, will you say that itâs just the AI being a bit fuzzy and I should instead just read your post directionally?
While itâs definitely a real thing that higher standards mean fewer posts, and this is something Iâve struggled with a lot personally, I also think itâs tremendously valuable to have posts where at least one person has carefully thought through all the words and how they fit together into a coherent argument.
ďThe NAO is Hiring for PartÂnerÂships, ReÂsponse, VirolÂogy, and Wet Lab Management
Iâve known a few people who say this.
Within EA? Because the normal EA argument Iâve heard is âdonât have kids, use the time/âresources more productivelyâ (ex: Rachels (2014)) or âhave kids if you want to, since we should all have some budget for doing things that are important to usâ (ex: me in 2013, a couple in 2023)
âThinkerâ vs âDoerâ gets pretty fuzzy: âchanging lawsâ certainly involves a lot of thinking, as do ~all of the highest-impact things you might be considering âdirectly improving the worldâ. I especially have trouble seeing how you could classify Farmerâs work in Haiti as something other than an attempt to directly improve the world.
But riffing on your ânot just the people who have told others that they shouldâ, and emphasizing the âthatâ, perhaps the line is whether someoneâs primary work has been persuading other people to be more altruistic and/âor effective? In which case Iâd probably put MacAskill, Ord and Singer, and Rosling as âThinkersâ and Karnofsky, Wise, and Farmer as âDoersâ. But several of the folks in the âThinkerâ category still did substantial âDoerâ work (Roslingâs hands-on public health work in Africa, MacAskillâs co-founding 80k, Ordâs cause prioritization, Singerâs political advocacy and donations).
Thanks for sharing!
The play tells the story of a group of teenagers who, upon learning that a mere five dollars can save an African childâs life, formulate a plan to steal artwork and donate the proceeds to Oxfam International.
While Iâm sure almost everyone here doesnât need to hear this, better to be explicit:
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$5 is only about 0.1% of the cost to save a life via the best known global health and development charities
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If youâre looking to donate in this area GiveWellâs recommendations are very likely better than Oxfam
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Donât steal to donate proceeds to charity
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ConÂflicted on AI Politics
This is relatively minor, but it would it be possible not to show a cookie notice to people loading the site from countries such as the US where these notices are not required?
Interesting! I hadnât realized people had started using the term this way!
Thatâs a box fan CR box
A filter with PC fans isnât a âCR boxââa Corsi-Rosenthal box is specifically a design based on box fans. For example, Wikipedia, US Davis, Clean Air Crew, and the Corsi-Rosenthal Foundation mention only box fans.
Good point! Iâm used to houses with the older systems (steam, forced hot water) that are common in the Northeast and wasnât thinking about this effect.
Efficiency in terms of fraction of removed particles wouldnât decrease, but because CFM will decrease efficiency in terms of CADR will too.
Ceiling fans are generally reversible, so you could have the ceiling fan blowing air up and mount the filters for airflow in the opposite direction. I havenât tested this configuration though!
There is actually this study from the national labs that indicate filters hardly need replacement at all. I think it is even worse than razorblades that grow dullâfilters last forever!
That study is looking at nuclear facilities, but Iâm not sure it generalizes to environments with more particulates in the air. In a dusty enough environment your filter will surely get clogged up to the point where youâre not able to move much air through it!
Sure!
I do have my question about your design (and GPT o4-mini-high is pretty skeptical), wondering whether the fan really draws all the air through the filters.
When I tested the prototype it worked well: https://ââwww.jefftk.com/ââp/ââceiling-air-purifier
Now that I know more about how these fans move air, I think it would work even better if the filters extended slightly lower.
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I think it may still be too expensive to make sense, but in poorer areas I think nasal swabs + Nanopore does much better than wastewater for pathogen-agnostic detection:
The costs of collecting the swabs (both the people collecting and compensation to participants) are lower.
Nanopore sequencing is cheaper if you donât need massive sequencing depth, and for swabs you probably donât.