KevinO

Karma: 353

KevinO 28 Oct 2019 20:48 UTC
39 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Eli Rose’s comment on: EA Hotel Fundraiser 5: Out of runway!
I also made a similarly sized donation.

KevinO 18 Apr 2024 11:57 UTC
26 points
7 ∶ 1
in reply to: Nathan Young’s comment on: Personal reflections on FTX
I believe that was discussed in the episode with Spencer. Search for ‘threatened’ in the transcript linked here.

00:22:30 Spencer Greenberg
And then the other thing that some people have claimed is that when Alameda had that original split up early on, where some people in the fact about trans community fled, that you had somehow threatened one of the people that had left. What? What was that all about?
00:22:47 Will MacAskill
Yeah. I mean, so yeah, it felt pretty.
00:22:50 Will MacAskill
This last when I read that because, yeah, certainly didn’t have a memory of threatening anyone. And so yeah, I reached out to the person who it was about because it wasn’t the person saying that they’d been friend. It was someone else saying that that person had been friend. So yeah, I reached out to them. So there was a conversation between me and that.
00:23:07 Will MacAskill
Person that was like kind of heated like.
00:23:09 Will MacAskill
But yeah, they don’t think I was like intending to intimidate them or anything like that. And then it was also like in my memory, not about the Alameda blow up. It was like a.
00:23:18 Will MacAskill
Different issue.

KevinO 24 Sep 2022 11:21 UTC
16 points
6 ∶ 0
in reply to: Wilbur’s comment on: My Personal Story of Rejection from EA Global
I think that is discussed in https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dsCTSCbfHWxmAr2ZT/open-ea-global (perhaps more directly in the comments if only indirectly in the main post, I don’t quite recall).
I think it’s because the conferences are networking-focused and the organizers want the attendees to be likely to have productive meetings (like if you physically bump in to someone, CEA wants high odds that they can help you or you can help them).
(Please correct me if I am wrong.)
I assume the broad categories for rejection from EAG are that CEA doesn’t think an individual will increase their personal impact, from having gone, more than someone else they could admit, and similarly won’t have as much value as a mentor/good-person-to-run-in-to than someone else they could admit.

KevinO 3 Nov 2021 10:54 UTC
14 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Buck’s comment on: Buck’s Shortform
From “Clarifying the Giving What We Can pledge” in 2017 (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/drJP6FPQaMt66LFGj/clarifying-the-giving-what-we-can-pledge#How_permanent_is_the_Pledge__)

”″”
How permanent is the Pledge?
The Pledge is a promise, or oath, to be made seriously and with every expectation of keeping it. But if someone finds that they can no longer keep the Pledge (for instance due to serious unforeseen circumstances), then they can simply contact us, discuss the matter if need be, and cease to be a member. They can of course rejoin later if they renew their commitment.
Some of us find the analogy of marriage a helpful one: you make a promise with firm intent, you make life plans based on it, you structure things so that it’s difficult to back out of, and you commit your future self to doing something even if you don’t feel like it at the time. But at the same time, there’s a chance that things will change so drastically that you will break this tie.
Breaking the Pledge is not something to be done for reasons of convenience, or simply because you think your life would be better if you had more money. But we believe there are two kinds of situations where it’s acceptable to withdraw from the Pledge.
One situation is when it would impose extreme costs for you. If you find yourself in hardship and don’t have any way to donate what you committed to while maintaining a reasonable quality of life for yourself and your dependants, this is a good reason to withdraw your Pledge. (Note that during unemployment you donate only 1% of spending money, as described under “Circumstances that change the Pledge” below.)
The other is when you find that you have an option to do more good. For example, imagine you pledged and are now deciding whether to found a nonprofit (which will take all your financial resources) or keep your “day job” in order to be able to donate 10%. If you have good reason to believe that the nonprofit will do significantly more good than the donations, that founding the nonprofit is not compatible with donating 10% of your income, and that you would not be able to make up the gap in donations within a couple of years, withdrawing your Pledge would be a reasonable thing to do.
The spirit of the Pledge is not to stop you from doing more good, and is not to lead you to ruin. If you find that it’s doing either of these things, you should probably break the Pledge.
We understand that some people have a very strong definition of “pledge” as meaning something that must not be broken under any circumstances. If this is your sense of the word, and you wouldn’t want to take a pledge if there were any chance of you being unable to keep it, you might find that Try Giving on an ongoing basis is a better fit for you.
”″”

KevinO 12 Apr 2024 13:54 UTC
12 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Mediocre EAs: career paths and how do they engage with EA?
This kind of thing gets asked every now and then, eg EA for dumb people?

KevinO 10 Dec 2022 12:45 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: KevinO’s Shortform
The EA subreddit is getting more participation from critics and/or people understandably upset about FTX. This is resulting in some low quality posts hitting the frontpage of the subreddit, since it’s so small and not very active.

KevinO 2 Mar 2021 23:22 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
on: KevinO’s Shortform
Today I learned about Simpol, an org working on solving global coordination problems: https://simpol.org

Their approach is to encourage governments to work together to enact “simultaneous policy” across multiple issues to take action while avoiding first-mover challenges or a race to the bottom. By negotiating across multiple issues, concessions can be made to entities that might lose out in some areas in order to keep the entire negotiation net-positive for all.

So far my learning has been from this podcast episode, although it took a while to really explain the not-very-complex solution. https://www.jimruttshow.com/john-bunzl/

KevinO 26 Oct 2019 22:12 UTC
10 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pablo’s comment on: EA Hotel Fundraiser 5: Out of runway!
I was just thinking that I didn’t really answer Gregory_Lewis’s question.

KevinO 4 Apr 2023 10:58 UTC
9 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Pat Myron’s comment on: Pat Myron’s Shortform
Some other career orgs:
- https://www.probablygood.org/
- https://www.animaladvocacycareers.org/
And for what it’s worth, 80,000 Hours has a bunch global health & animal related postings on their job board.

KevinO 13 Sep 2022 11:51 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Seven ways to become unstoppably agentic
“Agency” needs nuance—an update from the author.

KevinO 14 May 2022 11:51 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: If EA is no longer funding constrained, why should *I* give?
With respect to the last dollar of funding: I think Open Philanthropy expects to spend their last dollar on something more cost-effective than GiveDirectly. So I think the last dollar of spending will still look good, and at the worst case your spending now will move some other funding to something somewhat less effective but still pretty good down the line.
Another potential advantage for an individual donor would be identifying something not currently receiving large amounts of funding that you think is worth taking a bet on. That would give the initiative more time to demonstrate it’s value and to gather information on how well it’s achieving its goals (or it could be funding an individual to grow their skills or something).
We’ve also seen Will write that the FTX Future Fund rejected 95% of their applicants, so it’s not the case that there’s a money firehose that everyone has access to. Plenty of people are, presumably, open to working on new projects given funding.

KevinO 18 Nov 2021 18:15 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: KevinO’s Shortform
Get $50 to donate to charity at 2pm EST/11am PST (Nov 18) at the following url: https://www.tisbest.org/redefinegifting/

KevinO 1 Nov 2021 11:14 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Make a $100 donation into $200 (or more)
Edit: just refer to this list of orgs https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/f6kg8T2Lp6rDqxWwG/list-of-ea-related-organisations
+ see the Founder’s Pledge funds that Michael shared https://www.every.org/founderspledge

Here’s the subset of longtermist and infrastructure orgs I was able to find on the site:

- Founder’s Pledge (also their funds that Michael links in another comment)
- Future of Life Institute
- The Center for Human-Compatible AI
- Legal Priorities Project
- Nuclear Threat Initiative
- Machine Intelligence Research Institute
- Rethink Charity
- Rethink Priorities
- Centre For Effective Altruism

- Center for Election Science
- Generation Pledge
- Center for Applied Rationality
- WANBAM

KevinO 1 Jun 2019 9:37 UTC
9 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: RC Forward 2018 Year in Review
The cost-effectiveness analysis contains more info on some of your questions. I’m not sure of the total number of donors, but they mention “two large cryptocurrency donations from a single donor make up 66% of total donations”.

The model they link to also breaks down total donations by donor-size.

KevinO 7 Feb 2023 12:14 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: KevinO’s Shortform
We could still use more short, casual videos to win tens of thousands of dollars for effective charities! See Project for Awesome 2023: Make a short video for an EA charity!

KevinO 26 Sep 2022 11:18 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Any recommendation for how to explain EA funds grants to friend?
A bit of a sidestep but there there is also the new Longtermism Fund , for more legible longtermist donations that are probably easier to justify.

KevinO 9 Sep 2022 11:46 UTC
8 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Samotsvety’s AI risk forecasts
I am told that APS, in this context, stands for “advanced, planning, strategically aware” and is from Carlsmith’s report https://arxiv.org/abs/2206.13353

KevinO 1 Oct 2019 10:22 UTC
8 points
0 ∶ 0
on: New popular science book on x-risks: “End Times”
Here’s an interview with the author, Bryan Walsh: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/8/29/20830793/human-extinction-end-of-the-world-end-times-bryan-walsh

KevinO 26 Oct 2019 9:22 UTC
6 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Gregory Lewis’s comment on: EA Hotel Fundraiser 5: Out of runway!
From the body of the top post and this page: https://eahotel.org/fundraiser/, it sounds like they had estimated they would spend £5000 per month but instead spent £5700 per month. That may have contributed to running out early.

KevinO 18 Jan 2023 12:46 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Wil Perkins’s comment on: Wil Perkins’s Shortform
There’s a subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/EffectiveAltruism/

I think the comments aren’t exactly what you’d get on this forum but some of them are helpful and accurate.