Senior Research Scientist at NTT Research, Physics & Informatics Lab. jessriedel.com , jessriedel[at]gmail[dot]com
Jess_Riedel
Karma: 434
Consider changing the visual format a bit to better distinguish this forum from LW. They are almost indistinguishable right now, especially once you scroll down just a bit and the logo disappears.
Could you explain your first sentence? What risks are you talking about?
Also, how does one lottery up further if all the block sizes are $100k? Diving it up into multiple blocks doesn’t really work.
I’m curious about why blocks were chosen rather than just a single-lottery scheme, i.e., having all donors contribute to the same lottery, with a $100k backstop but no upper limit. The justification on the webpage is
Multiple blocks ensure that there is no cap on the number of donors who may enter the lottery, while ensuring that the guarantor’s liability is capped at the block size.
But of course we could satisfy this requirement with the single-lottery scheme. The single-lottery scheme also has the benefits that (1) the guarantor has significantly less risk since there’s a much higher chance they need to pay nothing, especially once the popularity of donor lotteries is more stable and (2) the “leverage” can get arbitrarily high rather than being capped by $100k/. The main feature (benefit?) of the multi-block scheme is, as Carl says elsewhere in this thread, “the odds of payouts for other participants are unaffected by anyone’s particular participation in this lottery design”. But it’s not clear to me why this non-interaction principle is better than allowing large leverage. We just want to be really careful about unintended incentives?
EAs seems pretty open to the idea of being big-tent with respect to key normative differences (animals, future people, etc). But total indifference to cause area seems too lax. What if I just want to improve my local neighborhood or family? Or my country club? At some point, it becomes silly.
It might be worth considering parallels with the Catholic Church and the Jesuits. The broader church is “high level”, but the requirements for membership are far from trivial.
The list of donation recipients from Nick’s DAF is here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1H2hF3SaO0_QViYq2j1E7mwoz3sDjdf9pdtuBcrq7pRU/edit#gid=0
I don’t believe there’s been any write-ups or dollar amounts, except the above list is ordered by donation size.
I am on the whole positive about this idea. Obviously, specialization is good, and creating dedicated fund managers to make donation decisions can be very beneficial. And it makes sense that the boundaries between these funds arise from normative differences between donors, while putting fund managers in charge of sorting out empirical questions about efficiency. This is just the natural extension, of the original GiveWell concept, to account for normative differences, and also to utilize some of the extra trust that some EAs will have for other people in the community that isn’t shared by a lot of GiveWell’s audience.
That said, I’m worried about principle-agent problems and transparency, and about CEA becoming an organization receiving monthly direct debits from the bank accounts of ten thousand people. Even if we assume that current CEA employees are incorruptible superhuman angels, giving CEA direct control of a firehose of cash makes it an attractive target for usurpers (in a way that it is not when it’s merely making recommendations and doing outreach). These sorts of worries apply much less to GiveWell when it’s donating to developing-world health charities than to CEA when it’s donating to EA start-ups who are good friends with the staff.
Will EA Fund managers be committed to producing the sorts of detailed explanations and justifications we see from GiveWell and Open Phil, at least after adjusting for donation size? How will the conflicts of interest be managed and documented with such a tightly interlinked community?
What sorts of additional precautions will be taken to manage these risks, especially for the long term?
Update: the Good Judgment Project has just launched Good Judgement Open. https://www.gjopen.com/
I am mildly worried that connecting strangers to make honor-system donation trades could lead to a dispute. There are going to be more and more new faces around if the various EA growth strategies this year pan out. The fact that donation trading has been going on smoothly until now means folks might get overly relaxed, and it only takes one publicized dispute to really do damage to the culture. Even if no one is outright dishonest, miscommunication could lead to a someone thinking they have been wronged to the tune of thousands of dollars.
I don’t think that communication between the donors, as Brian mentions, is fully satisfactory. Even if everyone promises to send receipts afterwards, you still have Byzantine generals’ problems. One idea is that we find someone at CEA who, at the least, can be listed as an email contact to which two donors can send their agreement before they execute, just so there’s a records and so the CEA person can point out any obvious confusion. I think this could be a very efficient use of CEA time, especially if it increases trust and therefore makes more trades possible.
Howdy, I’m trying to make a donation to CEA of about $4,000 this month from Canada. Would be very glad to swap with you for AMF. If you’re still up for this, please shoot me an email.
Worth noting that it can still be worth posting to your personal blog if only to increase how many people see it.
Very reasonable. Thanks Ryan.
Hey, I’m a postdoc in q. info (although more on the decoherence and q. foundations side of things). I’m interested to know more about where you’re at and how you found out about LessWrong. Shoot me an email if you want. My address is my username without the underscore @gmail.com .
I lean against creating multiple fora. Even if it was a good idea in the long run, I think that it’s better to start with one forum so that it’s easier to achieve a critical mass. It’s no exaggeration to say that LW’s Main/Discussion distinction was one of the most hated features of the site. I also think that fragmenting an online community and decreasing its usability are two of the most damaging things you can do to a budding community website.
This was interesting to me.
Here’s one more idea to throw out there: Divide the posts into “major” and “minor” tags and then include a checkbox for signed-in users that says something like “filter for major posts” that would only show the important/major/fleshed-out posts. If you wanted to make sure the minor posts didn’t get neglected by apathy, you could have that box become unchecked the next time the person visits. In order to maintain an impressive appearance to visitors, they would only see the major posts.
This should significantly reduce the chance that minor posts are neglected (except by people who shouldn’t or don’t want to see them) and would be expandable to a more extensive tagging system in the future.
Thanks for info Ryan. A couple of points:
(1) I don’t think minor posts like “Here’s an interesting article. Anyone have thoughts?” fit very well in the open thread. The open threads are kind of unruly, and it’s hard to find anything in there. In particular, it’s not clear when something new has been added.
One possibility is to create a second tier of posts which do not appear on the main page unless you specifically select it. Call it “minor posts” or “status updates” or whatever. (Didn’t LessWrong have something like this?) These would have essentially no barrier to entry and could consist of single link. However, the threaded comment sections would be a lot more useful than FB.
This is similar to Peter_Hurford and MichaelDickens and SoerenMind comments above.
(2) I’ve talked to at least a couple of other people who think EAs need a place to talk that’s more casual in the specific sense that comments aren’t saved for all eternity on the internet. (Or, at the very least, aren’t indexed by search engines.) Right now there is a significant friction associated with the fact that each time you click submit you have to make sure you’re comfortable with your name being attached to your comment forever.
It might make sense to combine (1) and (2) (or not).
I’m still fuzzy on the relationship between the EA Facebook group and the EA forum. Are we supposed to move most or all the discussion that was going on in the FB group here? Will the FB be shut down, and if not what will is be used for?
I think the format of the forum will present a higher barrier to low-key discussion than the FB group, e.g. I’d guess people are much less likely to post an EA related new article if they don’t have too much to add to it. This is primarily because the forum looks like a blog. Is FB style posting encouraged?
If this has all been described somewhere. Could someone point me toward it?
Also, what’s the relationship between the EA forum and the EA hub? http://effectivealtruismhub.com/
My impression is more that FHI is at the startup stage and CSER is simply an idea people have been kicking around. Whether or not you support CSER would depend on whether or not you think it’s actually going to be instantiated. Am I confused?
I think the claim, which I do not necessarily support, would be this: Many people give to multiple orgs as a way of selfishly benefiting themselves (by looking good and affiliating with many good causes), whereas a “good” EAer might spread their donation to multiple orgs as a way to (a) persuade the rest of the world to accomplish more good or (b) coordinate better with other EAs, a la the argument you link with Julia. (Whether or not there’s a morally important distinction between the laymen and the EAer as things actually take place in the real world is a bit dubious. EA arguments might just be a way to show off how well you can abstractly justify your actions.)
> They needn’t be strangers. This has already happened in the UK EA community amongst EAs who met through 80,000 Hours and supported each other financially in the early training and internship stages of their earning to give careers.
Agreed, but if the funds are effectively restricted to people you know and can sort of trust, then the public registry loses most of its use. Just let it be known among your trusted circle that you have money that you’d be willing share for EA activities. This has the added benefit of not putting you in the awkward position of having to turn down less-trusted folks who request money.
Were there a lot of new unknown or underappreciated facts in this book? From the summary, it sounds mostly like a reinterpretation of the standard history, which hinges on questions of historical determinism.