Jeff_Kaufman
Karma: 2,086
NewTop
My model is that if you want to move from generic software engineering to safety work that these would be very good next steps.
Simultaneous Shortage and Oversupply
I got the whole $20k: https://www.jefftk.com/p/facebook-donation-match
FB had a limit of $20k/donor this year, and I think that’s much more likely to go down than up. So depending how much you’re donating there’s not much reason to save more than than for Giving Tuesday.
There’s also the 1% PayPal match (plus 2% cash back) that’s been in December each year. At a 16%/year discount rate it’s worth waiting a couple months for that 3% but not all year.
“Trump signed a good law this week. Yes, really.” presents conflict: here’s a person who you usually expect to be doing harmful things, and here they are doing something good. It can’t make that hook without assuming something about their readers, and the hook draws people’s interest. It’s not an “unnecessary jibe”; it’s the sort of thing that draws far more interest than a headline like “Trump signed a good law about HIV this week.”
It’s not a tradeoff I would make in my writing, but Vox is a left-leaning outlet and it seems pretty reasonable to me for them to write for a left-leaning crowd.
College and Earning to Give
The linear trend line in https://i.ibb.co/BgBkLZW/regression-graph.png looks like a poor match. Instead I’d model it as there being multiple populations, where one major population has a very steep trendline.
Fixed, thanks!
(Though the title with
[Link]is only used on some views, for example not on the article-view page, so it’s somewhat confusing.)
2018 ACE Recommendations
2018 GiveWell Recommendations
A site that brings in money by showing ads generally makes under $10 per 1000 visits (CPM) so at most $0.01 per visit. Even if we make unrealistically positive assumptions (they’re getting very high CPMs, they donate 100% of the money, the money goes to charities that are as valuable as the AMF) then $10 to the AMF does as much good as visiting the Hunger Site daily for three years. With the same unrealistically positive assumptions, if this takes you 10s each time then you’re working for under $3.60/hr.
So I think this is probably not worth looking into further. Volunteering to look at ads just doesn’t bring in that much money so even if you got the best possible answers to your questions it wouldn’t make sense.
(Similarly, I don’t think trying to clone a site like this and run it targeted at GiveWell top charities would be worth it either.)
Who would you have recommended for these spots?
My not-that-informed view is something like “there are a bunch of problems with ACE, but I’m not sure there’s anyone better right now”. But if you have people in mind who would have been better for this role that would be really helpful to know!
You can extend your argument to even smaller probabilities: how much effort should go into this if we think the chance is 0.1%? 0.01? Or in the other direction, 50%, 90%, etc. In extremes it’s very clear that this should affect how much focus we put into averting it, and I don’t think there’s anything special about 1% vs 10% in this regard.
Another way of thinking about it is that AI is not the only existential risk. If your estimate for AI is 1% in the next ten years but pandemics is 10%, vs 10% for AI and 1% for pandemics, then that should also affect where you think people should focus.
a few random old posts on a sidebar
In my case I just have a list of posts I thought were good and want more people to see, but in a forum with voting you could show highly upvoted older posts.
I’m assuming that the counterfactual here is someone who wants to do unpaid direct work full time, has some funds available that could be used to either support themselves or could be donated to something high impact, and could either live in SF or Blackpool.
Is this the counterfactual for the hotel manager, or for a resident? I’m only trying to address the hotel manager role here, but I wouldn’t expect the counterfactual for a hotel manager to be unpaid direct work.
I think the value of having a very talented full-time manager for your group house is not about reducing expenses, it’s about creating a house culture that serves to multiply the impact of all the residents
This makes a lot of sense to me, but reading the Hotel Manager section the impression I get is that a hotel manager would be too busy to do much in that direction. There’s no discussion of their role in setting culture, and a lot of operations work.
These chores don’t go away if you live in an expensive housing market or make a high income.
If you have a high income, though, you can pay other people to do them: for example, instead of cooking you could buy frozen food, buy restaurant food, or hire a cook.
I expect that these economies of scale effects will become even more valuable as the number of people in the hotel grows.
My experience with cooking is that above about 6-10 people the economies of scale drop off a lot. I really like living in a house with enough adults that I can cook about once a week, but as the number of people (and combinations of dietary restrictions) grows you get beyond what one person can cook easily.
Overall, though, it sounds like you’re more arguing for “group houses are great” (which I agree on) and not “taking the hotel manager job has high counterfactual impact” (which I think is much more important?)
It looks like GiveWell put that project on hold in January 2018: https://www.givewell.org/charities/IDinsight/partnership-with-idinsight/cataract-surgery-project
Good point! I just measured some standard cheap new construction doors and found:
You lose 3/8″ on each side to the jamb.
The door open to 90° loses you 1 5/8″ on top of the jamb.
So a 30“ door has a clear opening of 27 5/8” (or 29 1/4″ with the door off).
Paradigm Academy was incubated by Leverage Research, as many organizations in and around EA are by others (e.g., MIRI incubated CFAR; CEA incubated ACE, etc.). As far as I can tell now, like with those other organizations, Paradigm and Leverage should be viewed as two distinct organizations.
See Geoff’s reply to me above: Paradigm and Leverage will at some point be separate, but right now they’re closely related (both under Geoff etc). I don’t think viewing them as separate organizations, where learning something about Leverage should not much affect your view of Paradigm, makes sense, at least not yet.
Aaron wrote:
The post has:
This is worded correctly but is a bit hard to interpret: I don’t organize the fundraiser, I help organize the EA participation in it. Overall it looks like:
Each year, for the week of Giving Tuesday, there’s a company wide system of fundraising for charities.
I coordinate EAs across the company in finding other EAs with compatible interests in their location/business unit and send out reminders about deadlines.
In the Cambridge office we have a bake-off where employees bake, sponsors put in some amount per good baked, other employees donate in order to taste them, and another set of sponsors matches these donations. The more you donate the more votes you get. This is the fundraiser the post talks about.
The bake-off organizers are people who think highly of GiveWell, partly related to the advocacy of Boston EAs, but I think don’t identify as EAs themselves. They make the decision about what charities the bake-off should feature, and have chosen GiveWell top charities for the past several years.
The bake-off is built around matching and sponsorship, especially that the donations people make to eat/vote are matched. That matching has been provided by Google Cambridge’s EAs, and one factor in the bake-off organizers choosing GiveWell charities is that we’ve been able to provide a large match pool.
It’s not clear how counterfactual any of this is. Each year when I publicize it internally part of what I talk about is that my match isn’t counterfactually valid, and I’ll be donating my share whether or not others also donate. I use it as a time to talk about why you shouldn’t expect matches like this to be counterfactual, and present it as “please join us in funding” and not “you can unlock extra funding”.