Justis

• JustisDec 3, 2018, 6:20 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Dawn Drescher’s comment on: EA Global Light­ning Talks (San Fran­cisco 2018)

  I also found his very interesting, though I craved something in a longer format. I could tell he had heftier models for situations where things cancel out less neatly, and I want to see them to see how robust they are! Looking forward to seeing what he’s working on at the Global Priorities Institute.

• JustisNov 22, 2018, 9:12 AM

  8 points

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  in reply to: Aaron Gertler 🔸’s comment on: Towards Bet­ter EA Ca­reer Advice

  Test prep tutoring and nowhere-near-the-top programming are both very good for making a living without spending much energy. The Scott Alexander post you and lexande linked has a good description of the relevant considerations for test prep tutoring.

  Living in a random non-hub city, programming jobs for the state pay only about $50k/​yr to start, but they’re easy to get (trial task for one was basically just “make an HTML website with maybe a button that does something”) and the expectations tend to be pretty low. I worked one of these as my main source of income until enough EA volunteering became EA freelancing became just barely sufficient to quit the day job and see what happened. I think this route is underappreciated, and the movement’s central orgs seem to have a lot more capacity to pay for specific work than to hire full-time, higher prestige employees.

  Main downside of a low-stress programming day job is that being in an extremely unambitious environment for 40 hours a week can be psychologically uncomfortable.

• JustisSep 10, 2018, 3:15 PM

  8 points

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  in reply to: Julia_Wise🔸’s comment on: Near-Term Effec­tive Altru­ism Discord

  +1. I’m in a very similar position—I make donations to near-term orgs, and am hungry for discussion of that kind. But because I sometimes do work for explicitly long-term and x-risk orgs, it’s hard for me to be certain if I qualify under current wording.

• JustisSep 6, 2018, 5:23 PM

  4 points

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  on: Which piece got you more in­volved in EA?

  The piece that got me to take the plunge and start giving 10% was Scott Alexander’s Nobody Is Perfect, Everything Is Commensurable.

  It convinced me singlehandedly to Try Giving, and I went to my first EA Global and took the pledge a couple years later. Before that, I’d pretty much not heard of EA as a movement at all.

• JustisAug 19, 2018, 9:23 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Milan Griffes’s comment on: CEA on com­mu­nity build­ing, rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness, and the EA Summit

  I really like the Open Philanthropy Project’s way of thinking about this problem:

  https://​​www.openphilanthropy.org/​​blog/​​update-cause-prioritization-open-philanthropy

  The short version (in my understanding):

  1. Split assumptions about the world/​target metrics into distinct “buckets”.

  2. Do allocation as a two step process: intra-bucket on that bucket’s metric, and inter-bucket separately using other sorts of heuristics.

  (If you like watching videos rather than reading blog posts, Holden also discussed this approach in his fireside chat at EAG 2018: San Francisco.)

• JustisAug 19, 2018, 9:08 PM

  12 points

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  in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: CEA on com­mu­nity build­ing, rep­re­sen­ta­tive­ness, and the EA Summit

  Disclosure: I copyedited a draft of this post, and do contract work for CEA more generally

  I don’t think that longtermism is a consensus view in the movement.

  The 2017 EA Survey results had more people saying poverty was the top priority than AI and non-AI far future work combined. Similarly, AMF and GiveWell got by far the most donations in 2016, according to that same survey. While I agree that someone can be a longtermist and think that practicality concerns prioritize near-term good work for now anyway, I don’t think this is a very compelling explanation for these survey results.

  As a first pass heuristic, I think EA leadership would guess correctly about community-held views more often if they held the belief “the modal EA-identifying person cares most about solving suffering that is happening in the world right now.”