Khorton

• Khorton 18 Apr 2019 16:00 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  This is not an idea, it’s an event that has already been planned. If this post was ‘I think get­ting world lead­ers to use psychedelics would im­prove the long term fu­ture’ or ‘How we could de­crim­i­nal­ize psychedelics in Cal­ifor­nia’ or even ‘I’m host­ing an event—how can I make it more use­ful?’, I’d be more okay with it.

• Khorton 18 Apr 2019 9:19 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelPlant's comment on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  Face­book. Twit­ter. Your tele­phone. There are plenty of ways to talk to other EAs.

  I think po­ten­tially the dis­agree­ment is whether the Fo­rum should be a one-stop-shop for ev­ery­thing EA or whether it should be re­served for a par­tic­u­lar kind of in­for­ma­tion about EA. I think the EA Fo­rum should be used for shar­ing ideas with the EA com­mu­nity and re­ceiv­ing use­ful feed­back. I don’t think this post is a good ex­am­ple of that.

  (Also, I definitely didn’t think Aaron was act­ing in bad faith! He said he was sel­l­ing a thing to the EA com­mu­nity and I agreed he was sel­l­ing a thing to the EA com­mu­nity. I have no prob­lem with that, just keep it off the Fo­rum.)

• Khorton 18 Apr 2019 7:09 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  “I think self-pro­mo­tion of both for-profit & non-profit pro­jects that are be­ing un­der­taken for EA rea­sons should be fair game for the Fo­rum.”

  Maybe. This post did not con­vince me that the busi­ness was cre­ated ‘for EA rea­sons.’ And con­trary to Fo­rum stan­dards, it was writ­ten to per­suade, not to in­form—oth­er­wise why would there be no stud­ies listed that found no effect or a nega­tive effect? This is the kind of be­havi­our I ex­pect from a pro­mo­tional web­site, not the EA Fo­rum.

  Edit : If the goal is to give doc­tors a good ex­pe­rience be­fore they pre­scribe it, that makes a lot of sense and could po­ten­tially do a lot of good… But I don’t know any prac­tis­ing doc­tors in the EA com­mu­nity, so this is definitely the wrong place to ad­ver­tise!

• Khorton 17 Apr 2019 19:57 UTC

  21 points

  on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  This feels in­ap­pro­pri­ate. I don’t want to be sold things on the EA Fo­rum.

• Khorton 17 Apr 2019 19:55 UTC

  7 points

  on: Should EA grant­mak­ing be sub­ject to in­de­pen­dent au­dit?

  What level of au­dit are we talk­ing about? Are we just talk­ing about some­one who en­sures peo­ple aren’t giv­ing money to (un­de­serv­ing) friends and fam­ily? Or are we talk­ing about scru­ti­niz­ing the de­ci­sions to some ex­tent?

• Khorton 17 Apr 2019 6:55 UTC

  18 points

  on: Re­duc­ing EA job search waste

  I want more in­for­ma­tion, but I don’t want in­for­ma­tion shared about me with­out my con­sent! I would definitely not work some­where that shared my CV and ap­pli­ca­tion notes with­out my con­sent. This pro­posal is also ille­gal in Europe.

• Khorton 12 Apr 2019 18:28 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: kbog's comment on: Poli­ti­cal cul­ture at the edges of Effec­tive Altruism

  I would take your re­sponse more se­ri­ously if you hadn’t told ev­ery­one who com­mented that they had mi­s­un­der­stood your post.

  If ev­ery­one’s miss­ing the point, pre­sum­ably you should write the point more clearly?

• Khorton 12 Apr 2019 11:00 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Halffull's comment on: Poli­ti­cal cul­ture at the edges of Effec­tive Altruism

  I was try­ing to figure out why I dis­like this post so much, and I think this is why—the as­sump­tion that peo­ple in EA are cor­rect and ev­ery­one else is in­cor­rect, com­bined with a lack of depth when ex­plain­ing why cer­tain things top­ics are crit­i­cized, and miss­ing sev­eral im­por­tant cri­tiques. (Nor­mally I don’t mind in­com­plete posts, but I think the tone com­bined with the list not be­ing very good re­ally both­ered me.)

• Khorton 12 Apr 2019 7:33 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: kbog's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  I think I agree, but why do you think so?

• Khorton 11 Apr 2019 20:30 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: technicalities's comment on: Who is work­ing on find­ing “Cause X”?

  Their web­site sug­gests it wasn’t in­de­pen­dent.

  ‘The pri­mary is­sue for OPIS is the eth­i­cal im­per­a­tive to re­duce suffer­ing. Linked to the effec­tive al­tru­ism move­ment, they choose causes that are most likely to pro­duce the largest im­pact, de­ter­mined by what Leighton calls “a clear un­der­ly­ing philos­o­phy which is suffer­ing-fo­cused”.’

• Khorton 11 Apr 2019 7:42 UTC

  1 point

  on: Who in EA en­joys man­ag­ing peo­ple?

  I en­joy man­ag­ing at my policy job, and I’m ac­tively work­ing on grow­ing that skill set, but I’m not sure how closely that al­igns with your sub ques­tions. I sec­ond the com­ment be­low—what kind of an­swer are you look­ing for?

• Khorton 10 Apr 2019 19:40 UTC

  7 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  Com­pen­sa­tion is also good in case you ever re­tire and some­one else with differ­ent fi­nan­cial needs takes over (but it doesn’t seem su­per im­por­tant—there are other things you could solve first).

• Khorton 10 Apr 2019 19:11 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: toonalfrink's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  I think on a post with 100+ com­ments the qual­ity of de­ci­sions is more likely to be bot­tle­necked by the qual­ity of feed­back than the quan­tity. Be­ing able to ex­plain why you think some­thing is a bad idea usu­ally re­sults in higher qual­ity feed­back, which I think will re­sult in bet­ter de­ci­sions than just get­ting a lot of quick in­tu­ition-based feed­back.

• Khorton 10 Apr 2019 11:03 UTC

  25 points

  in reply to: Jess_Whittlestone's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  I would be in favour of this fund us­ing ~5% of its money to pay for staff costs, in­clud­ing a per­ma­nent sec­re­tariat. The sec­re­tariat would prob­a­bly de­crease pres­sure on grant­mak­ers a lit­tle, and im­prove grant/​feed­back qual­ity a lit­tle, which makes the costs seem worth it. (I know you’ve already con­sid­ered this and I want to en­courage it!)

  I imag­ine the sec­re­tariat would:

  -Han­dle the ad­min of open­ing and ad­ver­tis­ing a fund­ing round

  -Re­spond to many ques­tions on the Fo­rum, Face­book, and by email, and di­rect more difficult ques­tions to the cor­rect person

  -Co­or­di­nate the writ­ing of Fo­rum posts like this

  -Take notes on what ad­di­tional in­for­ma­tion grant­mak­ers would like from ap­pli­cants, con­tact ap­pli­cants with fol­low-up ques­tions, and sug­gest iter­a­tions of the ap­pli­ca­tion form

  -(po­ten­tially) Man­age han­dover to new grant­mak­ers when cur­rent mem­bers step down

  -(po­ten­tially) Sift through ap­pli­ca­tions and re­move those which are ob­vi­ously in­ap­pro­pri­ate for the Long Term Fu­ture Fund

  -(po­ten­tially) Provide a cou­ple of lines of fairly generic but pri­vate feed­back for applicants

• Khorton 8 Apr 2019 22:33 UTC

  44 points

  on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  I’m happy that peo­ple are push­ing back on some of these grants, and even hap­pier that Habryka is re­spond­ing to gra­ciously. How­ever, I’m con­cerned that some com­ments are bor­der­ing on un­helpfully per­sonal.

  I’d sug­gest that, when crit­i­cis­ing a par­tic­u­lar pro­ject, com­men­tors should try to ex­plain the rule or policy that would help grant-mak­ers avoid the same prob­lem in the fu­ture. That should also help us avoid mak­ing things per­sonal.

  Ex­am­ples I stole from other com­ments and re­worded:

  -“I’m skep­ti­cal of the grant to X be­cause I think grant­mak­ers should re­cuse them­selves from grant­ing to their friends.” (I saw this crit­i­cism but don’t ac­tu­ally know who it’s refer­ring to.)

  -“I don’t think any EA Funds should be given to print­ing books that haven’t been pro­fes­sion­ally ed­ited.”

  -“I think that peo­ple like Lau­ren should have funds available af­ter they burn out, but I don’t think the Long-Term Fu­ture Fund is the right source of post-burnout funds.”

• Khorton 8 Apr 2019 21:49 UTC

  23 points

  in reply to: anoneaagain's comment on: Long Term Fu­ture Fund: April 2019 grant decisions

  Down­voted for an un­nec­es­sar­ily un­kind tone.

• Khorton 2 Apr 2019 6:52 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: In­no­vat­ing In­sti­tu­tions: Robin Han­son Ar­gu­ing for Con­duct­ing Field Tri­als on New Institutions

  I would give him feed­back, but frankly I find his pro­posal too con­fus­ing to cri­tique. I’ve read it twice over three days now. At first, I thought he was refer­ring to so­cial in­sti­tu­tions, es­pe­cially be­cause he used an ex­am­ple about driv­ing. Then he claimed busi­nesses are will­ing to do late-stage in­no­va­tion and char­i­ties should fill in the gap.

  What does he want in­no­vated? Pri­vate in­sti­tu­tions like char­i­ties and busi­nesses, or pub­lic in­sti­tu­tions?

  If he had given any refer­ences to this allegedly thriv­ing liter­a­ture or any con­crete ex­am­ples of how one idea could go from aca­demic to char­ity to busi­ness, that would have been more helpful. If he’s just talk­ing about peo­ple try­ing out aca­demic ideas in, say, schools, we already do that, so that’s not a very ex­cit­ing ar­gu­ment for me.

• Khorton 31 Mar 2019 13:26 UTC

  −1 points

  on: Lo­cal Effec­tive Altru­ism Net­work’s New Fo­cus for 2019

  If or­ga­niz­ers re­ally value the tech sup­port you provide, why are you phas­ing it out?

• Khorton 31 Mar 2019 13:25 UTC

  10 points

  on: The Case for the EA Hotel

  I’m con­fused. This post is ar­gu­ing that the EA Ho­tel is a good way to en­courage new pro­jects, but from what I’ve seen, only a small minor­ity of res­i­dents are found­ing pro­jects. Many seem to be study­ing and/​or blog­ging; a few are work­ing for es­tab­lished EA or­gani­sa­tions.

• Khorton 31 Mar 2019 0:13 UTC

  1 point

  on: EA Ho­tel fundraiser 4: con­crete out­puts af­ter 10 months

  It would be helpful if you could also list how long each per­son stayed at the ho­tel. Some of these peo­ple seem to have pro­duced very lit­tle for 10 months, but maybe they were only there for one month!