Jeff_Kaufman

• Jeff_Kaufman 11 Jun 2019 19:59 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Holly_Elmore's comment on: There’s Lots More To Do

  Other peo­ple be­ing mis­lead is how I read “Claims to the con­trary are ei­ther ob­vi­ous non­sense, or mar­ket­ing copy by the same peo­ple who brought you the ob­vi­ous non­sense. Spend money on tak­ing care of your­self and your friends and the peo­ple around you and your com­mu­nity and try­ing spe­cific con­crete things that might have spe­cific con­crete benefits. And try to fix the un­der­ly­ing sys­tems prob­lems that got you so con­fused in the first place.”

• Jeff_Kaufman 31 May 2019 1:12 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: ishaan's comment on: There’s Lots More To Do

  I don’t think the post is cor­rect in con­clud­ing that the cur­rent marginal cost-per-life-saved es­ti­mates are wrong. An­nual malaria deaths are around 450k, and if you gave the Against Malaria Foun­da­tion $5k * 450k ($2.3B) they would not be able to make sure no one died from malaria in 2020, but still wouldn’t give much ev­i­dence that $5k was too low an es­ti­mate for the marginal cost. It just means that AMF would have lots of difficulty scal­ing up so much, that some deaths can’t be pre­vented by dis­tribut­ing nets, that some places are harder to work in, etc.

  It does mean that big fun­ders have seen the cur­rent cost-per-life saved num­bers and de­cided not to give those or­ga­ni­za­tions all the money they’d be able to use at that cost-effec­tive­ness. But there are lots of rea­sons other than what Ben gives for why you might de­cide to do that, in­clud­ing:

  • You have mul­ti­ple things you care about and are fol­low­ing a strat­egy of fund­ing each of them some. For ex­am­ple, OpenPhil has also funded an­i­mal char­i­ties and ex­is­ten­tial risk re­duc­tion.

  • You don’t want a dy­namic where you’re re­spon­si­ble for the vast ma­jor­ity of a sup­pos­edly in­de­pen­dent or­ga­ni­za­tion’s fund­ing.

  • You think bet­ter giv­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties may be­come available in the fu­ture and want to have funds if that hap­pens.

• Jeff_Kaufman 30 May 2019 0:14 UTC

  10 points

  in reply to: Larks's comment on: There’s Lots More To Do

  I agree the dis­tri­bu­tion would be in­ter­est­ing! But it de­pends how many such op­por­tu­ni­ties there might be, no? What about:

  “Imag­ine that over time the low hang­ing fruit is picked and fur­ther op­por­tu­ni­ties for char­i­ta­ble giv­ing get pro­gres­sively more ex­pen­sive in terms of cost per life saved equiv­a­lents (CPLSE). At what CPLSE, in dol­lars, would you no longer donate?”

There’s Lots More To Do

• Jeff_Kaufman 25 Apr 2019 18:03 UTC

  12 points

  on: Why does EA use QALYs in­stead of ex­pe­rience sam­pling?

  I tried ex­pe­rience sam­pling my­self for about a year and a half (in­tro, con­clu­sion) and it made me much more skep­ti­cal of the sys­tem. I’m just not that sure how happy I am at any given point:

  When I first started rat­ing my hap­piness on a 1-10 scale I didn’t feel like I was very good at it. At the time I thought I might get bet­ter with prac­tice, but I think I’m ac­tu­ally get­ting worse at it. In­stead of re­ally think­ing “how do I feel right now?” it’s re­ally hard not to just think “in past situ­a­tions like this I’ve put down ‘6’ so I should put down ‘6’ now”.

  And:

  I don’t have my phone ping me dur­ing the night, be­cause I don’t want it to wake me up. Be­fore hav­ing a kid this worked prop­erly: I’d plug in my phone, which turns off pings, promptly fall asleep, wake up in the morn­ing, un­plug my phone. Now, though, my sleep is gen­er­ally in­ter­rupted sev­eral times a night. Time spent wait­ing to see if the baby falls back asleep on her own, or sooth­ing her back to sleep if she doesn’t, or ly­ing awake at 4am be­cause it’s hard to fall back asleep when you’ve had 7hr and just spent an hour walk­ing around and bounc­ing the baby; none of these are counted. On the whole, these ex­pe­riences are much less en­joy­able than my av­er­age; if the baby started sleep­ing through the night such that none of these were needed any­more I wouldn’t see that as a loss at all. Which means my data is bi­ased up­ward. I’m cu­ri­ous how hap­piness sam­pling stud­ies have han­dled this; peo­ple with in­som­nia would be in a similar situ­a­tion.

  I agree that DALY/​QALY mea­sure­ments aren’t great ei­ther, though.

• Jeff_Kaufman 11 Apr 2019 12:16 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: kbog's comment on: Value of Work­ing in Ads?

  I think the in­ter­net shouldn’t run on ads. Mak­ing peo­ple pay for con­tent en­sures that the in­ter­net is pro­vid­ing real value rather than just clickbaiting

  Be­fore the in­ter­net you still had tabloids with shock­ing claims on the cover that, af­ter you bought the pa­per and read it you re­al­ized the claims were overblown. If we moved away from ads the spe­cific case of “you pay, and af­ter­wards you re­al­ize you were baited” would still ex­ist.

  the de­pen­dence on ad­ver­tis­ing cre­ates con­tro­ver­sies where cor­po­ra­tions com­pel con­tent hosts to en­gage in du­bi­ous cen­sor­ship.

  The role of mid­dle­men like Google diminishes this sub­stan­tially. Since the ad­ver­tisers and pub­lish­ers aren’t talk­ing di­rectly to each other we end up with cen­sor­ship only on the sort of thing that ad­ver­tisers gen­er­ally agree on: things like “adult or ma­ture, copy­righted, vi­o­lent, or hate­ful con­tent”—AdSense poli­cies: a be­gin­ner’s guide

  Yes in the­ory peo­ple could always cre­ate and use paid web­sites, but there is too much in­er­tia, both eco­nom­i­cally (net­work effects) and so­cially (peo­ple now feel very en­ti­tled to the In­ter­net).

  I’m not con­vinced this isn’t just “peo­ple don’t want to have to pay for things, and mostly don’t mind ads that much”. News­pa­pers, mag­a­z­ines, and ca­ble TV both cost money and have ads. Ana­log ra­dio sticks around on an ad-funded ba­sis and peo­ple keep listen­ing be­cause it’s in­cred­ibly low fric­tion.

  The gov­ern­ment can always shift tax and welfare policy to ac­count for the ad­di­tional fi­nan­cial bur­den on low in­come peo­ple.

  Ok, but in prac­tice the gov­ern­ment mostly doesn’t do this. Figur­ing out how to get it to do this would open up a *ton* of valuable poli­cies, but we also need to make rea­son­able choices in the pre­sent.

Value of Work­ing in Ads?

• Jeff_Kaufman 8 Apr 2019 19:21 UTC

  26 points

  on: Salary Ne­go­ti­a­tion for Earn­ing to Give

  I’ve helped a few peo­ple ne­go­ti­ate salaries at tech com­pa­nies, and my ex­pe­rience has been peo­ple always bring me in too late. You want to have mul­ti­ple ac­tive offers at the same time so you can get them to bid against each other. For ex­am­ple, when I came back to Google I did:

  • Google made me an offer

  • Face­book beat Google’s offer

  • Ama­zon de­clined to match ei­ther offer

  • Google beats Face­book’s offer

  • Face­book beats Google’s offer

  • Google matches Face­book’s offer

  The ideal for you is lots of back and forth, which is the op­po­site of what they want. They want to cut it short and will say things like “You’re ask­ing for a lot, but I think might be able to get it for you if I talk to my boss. If we can do $X can you con­firm you’ll ac­cept it?” You want to be pos­i­tive enough that they’ll come back with an offer of $X, but not so pos­i­tive that you have no ne­go­ti­at­ing room left if they ac­cept it.

• Jeff_Kaufman 23 Mar 2019 12:05 UTC

  27 points

  in reply to: Halstead's comment on: Apology

  Th­ese steps, to my knowl­edge, are com­pletely un­prece­dented for CEA.

  I think CEA may have done some­thing similar with Gleb, though for very differ­ent rea­sons: https://​​fo­rum.effec­tivealtru­ism.org/​​posts/​​fn7bo8sYEHS3RPKQG/​​con­cerns-with-in­ten­tional-insights

• Jeff_Kaufman 6 Mar 2019 3:20 UTC

  13 points

  in reply to: Peter_Hurford's comment on: After one year of ap­ply­ing for EA jobs: It is re­ally, re­ally hard to get hired by an EA organisation

  (Peter has been one of sev­eral peo­ple con­tin­u­ing to ar­gue “earn­ing to give is un­der­val­ued, most orgs could still do use­ful things with more fund­ing”.)

• Jeff_Kaufman 6 Feb 2019 18:09 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: EA Bos­ton 2018 Year in Review

  Aaron wrote:

  Jeff’s fundraiser for Google...

  The post has:

  For the past few years, Jeff Kauf­man has led Google Cam­bridge’s EAs in suc­cess­fully lob­by­ing to di­rect that money to­ward GiveWell-recom­mended char­i­ties. At be­tween a quar­ter-mil­lion and a half-mil­lion dol­lars each year, this may be the largest fundrais­ing event for GiveWell char­i­ties in the world.

  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”.

• Jeff_Kaufman 28 Jan 2019 0:55 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: richard_ngo's comment on: Si­mul­ta­neous Shortage and Oversupply

  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

• Jeff_Kaufman 25 Jan 2019 14:52 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: BenMillwood's comment on: EAs Should In­vest All Year, then Give only on Giv­ing Tuesday

  I got the whole $20k: https://​​www.jefftk.com/​​p/​​face­book-dona­tion-match

• Jeff_Kaufman 10 Jan 2019 22:37 UTC

  15 points

  on: EAs Should In­vest All Year, then Give only on Giv­ing Tuesday

  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.

• Jeff_Kaufman 21 Dec 2018 19:09 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Larks's comment on: Re­sponse to a Dy­lan Matthews ar­ti­cle on Vox about bipartisanship

  “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

• Jeff_Kaufman 12 Dec 2018 16:58 UTC

  6 points

  on: EA Sur­vey 2018 Series: Dona­tion Data

  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.

• Jeff_Kaufman 26 Nov 2018 20:29 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Ben Pace's comment on: 2018 GiveWell Recommendations

  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