I’m a co-founder and co-executive director at the London-based Center on Long-Term Risk, a research group and grantmaker focused on preventing s-risks from AI. I also advise the Long-Term Future Fund.
My background is in medicine (BMed) and economics (MSc) with a focus on health economics and development economics.
Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this!
Very cool!
I think for me personally, this would work better if there were two buttons at the end – one called “publish”, one called “share as draft with users” or something like that. That puts it more in the reference class of “this is a form of publishing my work” rather than “here’s some additional feature that I don’t understand how it works”.
Also: I notice that my wording was a bit unfriendly – apologies, I would like to retract that. :)
EDIT: It seems that drafts don’t support comments. I think this is one of the main features I was hoping for.
Categories / sub-fora / better overview of tags
I think it would be very helpful if the forum was made easier to navigate by creating categories/sub-fora, making tags more intuitively accessible, or some other method. E.g., how do I find the most-upvoted forum posts and comments about EA investing?
I would like to promote Wei Dai’s suggestion that it would be nice if it was possible to share drafts privately and then potentially make them public at a later point. (I think there’s some chance that this is already possible, but the UX doesn’t seem intuitive, otherwise I would have noticed already.)
Before implementing, it seems worth talking to users to find out whether this would actually make them more likely to share their internal work publicly at some point. It could also be good to find out whether there are any other ways that could make people more likely to share their internal work publicly.
Some info here: https://youtu.be/Y4YrmltF2I0?t=157
Your point reminds me of the “history is written by the winners” adage – presumably, most civilizations would look back and think of their history as one of progress because they views their current values most favorably.
Perhaps this is one of the paths that would eventually contribute to a “desired dystopia” outcome, as outlined in Ord’s book: we fail to realize that our social structure is flawed and leads to suffering in a systematic manner that’s difficult to change.
(Also related: https://www.gwern.net/The-Narrowing-Circle )
In addition to the examples you mention, the world has become much more unequal over the past centuries, and I wonder how that impacts welfare. Relatedly, I wonder to what degree there is more loneliness and less purpose and belonging than in previous times, and how that impacts welfare (and whether it relates to the Easterlin paradox). EAs don’t seem to discuss these aspects of welfare often. (Somewhat related books: Angus Deaton’s The Great Escape and Junger’s Tribe.)
I second Stefan’s suggestion to share this as a normal post – I realize I should have read your shortform much sooner.
I stumbled a bit with the framing here: I think it’s often the case that you need a lot of person-internal talent (including a good attitude, altruistic commitment, etc.) to learn X.
I’d personally be excited to spend more time on mentorship of EA community members but it feels kind of hard to find potential mentees who aren’t already in touch with many other mentors (either because I’m bad at finding them or because we need more “great people” or because I’m not great at mentoring people to learn X).
I was thinking it’s perhaps best to list it like this:
“Brian Tomasik’s Essays on Reducing Suffering (or FRI/CLR, EAF/GBS Switzerland, REG)”
I think Brian’s work brought several people into EA and may continue to do so, whereas that seems less likely for the other categories.
I also see the point about historic changes, but I personally never thought the previous categories were particularly helpful.
(moved comment)
(Btw, I think you can remove REG/FRI/EAF/Swiss from future surveys because we’ve deemphasized outreach and have been focusing on research. I also think the numbers substantially overlap with “local groups”.)
A bit offtopic, but if this isn’t available yet, I’d be curious to see the distribution of “When did you join EA?” as an upper-bound estimate of the growth of the EA community.
See also this: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/MBJvDDw2sFGkFCA29/is-ea-growing-ea-growth-metrics-for-2018
I found this incredibly interesting and useful, in particular the “Engagement Level” section. Thanks! :)
(moved up)
I’m currently helping put together the investment strategy for a DAF and my tentative conclusion is that (contrary to what it says in most EA investment-related articles) it doesn’t make sense to use a leveraged global market portfolio instead of (leveraged) global stocks. Perhaps much of the theory doesn’t apply in practice because it doesn’t take fees and the cost of leverage into account:
Bonds:
Buying bonds/TIPS with a ~0% return at a 0.75% margin loan cost seems like a certain loss. (Perhaps this was different before quantitative easing, so it might make more sense again at some point in the future.) (EDIT: The currently cheapest source of leverage appears to be box spread financing at ~0.55% p.a. for 3 years. The 3y US govt bond yield is 0.2% p.a. So even with cheap sources of leverage, it’s not worth it.)
Bonds (weighted BND + BNDX) slightly underperformed cash in the recent crisis, so perhaps aren’t very anticorrelated with stocks.
Commodities: Commodity ETFs have high TERs of ≥0.58%; buying and rolling individual futures costs time. (EDIT: Even gold (GLD) has a TER of 0.4%.)
(REITs: Already included in stock ETFs.)
(Added some edits in parentheses to the first paragraph.)
Yeah, I think this is worth taking seriously. (FWIW, I think I had been mostly (though perhaps not completely) aware that you are agnostic.)
I wonder why you think recusal is a bad way to address COIs. The downsides seem minimal to me: The other fund managers can still vote in favor of a grant, and the recused fund manager can still provide information about the potential grantee. This will also automatically mean that other fund managers have to invest more time into investigating the grant, which is something you seemed to favor. I’d be keen to hear your thoughts.
In comparison, using internal veto power seems like a more brittle solution that relies more on attention from other fund managers and might not work in all instances.
In comparison, disclosure often seems more complicated to me because it interferes with the privacy of fund managers and potential grantees.
I think Open Phil’s situation is substantially different because they are accountable to a very different type of donor, have fewer grant evaluators per grant, and most of their grants fall outside the EA community such that COIs are less common. (That said, I wonder about the COI policy for their EA grants committee.) GiveWell is also in a landscape where COIs are much less likely to arise.
I think there should be a fairly restrictive COI policy for all of the funds, not just for the LTFF.
I would love for there to be an analysis of how demographically diverse core EAs are (high self-reported engagement and/or EA Forum membership).
(I also wrote this here.)
Nice addition and caveats, thanks! :)