leillustrations🔸

Karma: 621

leillustrations🔸 19 Nov 2024 3:57 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Donation Election Discussion Thread
I noticed my view of these charities splits roughly into three categories: a) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a good chance (>30%) of being more effective than givedirectly, b) My knowledge of this charity makes me think it has a low chance of being more effective than givedirectly (<10%), and charities, and c) I wish I knew more about this charity.
I added those in category a) to the top of my list, in no particular order for now.
I’m kind of confused why I don’t think anything is range 10-30%, but it seems I don’t...

leillustrations🔸 21 Oct 2024 5:38 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Whose transparency can we celebrate?
I think we should celebrate doing things which are better than not doing that thing, even if we don’t know what the counterfactual would have been. For example:
- When a friend donates to charity, I show appreciation, not ask him how sure he is that it was the best possible use of his money
- When my relative gets a good grade, I congratulate her—I don’t start questioning if she really prioritised studying for the right subject
- When a server is nice to me, I thank them—I don’t ask them why they’re talking to me instead of serving someone else
I appreciate that transparency might never be on the top of your to do list, and that might be the correct decision. But when an organisation is transparent, that’s a public good—it helps me and the community make better decisions about how I want to do good, and I want them to know it helped me.
Public goods have this slightly annoying feature of being disincentivised, because they helps everyone, often at the cost of those providing the good. In an ideal world EAs would all do it anyway because we’re perfect altruists, but we still respond to incentives like everyone else. This is why I don’t think we need to go around asking eg. who has sent the best funding applications, even though that can often be more important than being transparent.
I’d love to talk about other important public goods that we should celebrate!

leillustrations🔸 13 Oct 2024 6:13 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Open Letter to Young EAs
Would you be up for making your “deaths of effective altruism” article available in a way that isn’t paywalled?

leillustrations🔸 8 Oct 2024 2:24 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 1
on: Discussion thread: Animal Welfare vs. Global Health Debate Week
In terms of EA charities most commonly cited in these areas only, I think global health charities are much more well evidenced.
I think the most effective animal welfare interventions are probably more effective, I’m just much less sure what they are.

leillustrations🔸 17 Sep 2024 4:37 UTC
3 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Mapping of Antibiotic-Resistant Bacteria Through GIS Data and Medical Reports.
Thanks for your work here! I can see that the data here is limited, and I think that makes projects like this much harder but still very valuable.
A couple of questions/suggestions:
- I’m unable to find any .csv’s to download on that page. Could you point out where they are?
- It looks to me like all the data you have is at the country level – is this correct?
  - I’m generally a big fan of geospatial work, but I’m not sure its helping in your case. It becomes quickly confusing if I turn on more than one layer at once, and I can’t see any of the correlations you discuss.
  - You say: “layer overlapping, statistical variable calculations using GeoDa software, and interpolation were used to search for relevant indicators for spatial analysis” – can you specify what you did here?

leillustrations🔸 17 Sep 2024 4:15 UTC
7 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Should you work at a frontier AI company?
At the risk of sounding naive: I’d like to point out you can go work for a frontier AI company and give lots of money to AI safety (or indeed any other cause area you believe in).
If nothing else, if you give at least the salary difference between a frontier job and a lower-pay non-frontier AI safety job, this prevents you from lying to yourself: thinking you are working at a frontier company because you believe its good, while actually doing it because of the benefits to you.

leillustrations🔸 17 Aug 2024 2:13 UTC
14 points
3 ∶ 0
on: This chart is right. Most interventions don’t do much. (Cameroon experience)
This is great! I think its extremely important and underrated (dare I say ‘neglected’?) work to identify and shift resources towards more effective charities in smaller contexts, even if those charities are unlikely to be the most globally effective.
Are you able to share more of your analysis or data? I’m curious about the proportion of charities in the categories you identify above, and what, if any numerical/categorical values you assigned.

leillustrations🔸 16 Aug 2024 7:38 UTC
5 points
2 ∶ 1
in reply to: yanni kyriacos’s comment on: Who would you like to see speak at EA Global?
Upvoted because −50 karma strikes me as excessive for a joke (even if in poor taste)

leillustrations🔸 16 Aug 2024 7:36 UTC
5 points
3 ∶ 0
on: Who would you like to see speak at EA Global?
- Presentations from any of the individuals who work on evaluation, getting “into the weeds” of how decisions are made, and recent work
- Presentations from Givewell grantees on what they’re currently working on
- Bill / Melinda Gates, or otherwise someone from the Gates foundation
- Elon Musk, or people from Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX
- People from pharmaceutical companies
- Board members of EVF
- Sal Khan
- A talk from successful edutainment/social media people who discuss EA-adjacent ideas like CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, etc. (who did not necessarily start out EA-funded)
- Podcast interviewers who discuss EA-relevant content, eg. Ezra Klein (as already mentioned), Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan.
- People running non-cause area EA interest groups, eg. SEADS, High Impact [Engineers, Law, Professionals, Medicine, etc], Religious EA groups, on what they’re working on/how EA is different in their communities

leillustrations🔸 9 Aug 2024 3:35 UTC
4 points
2 ∶ 0
on: Apply to help run EAGxSingapore or EAGxVirtual!
I suspect you would get a much wider applicant pool for EAGxSingapore if it were a week later.
The time requirements (<10 hours/week for most roles for most of the process, then full-time the week of the conference) is not really viable for most working professionals, and more suited to students who would be on winter break—but it looks like NUS (Singapore), Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University (Phillipines), and Fulbright University (Vietnam), ie. the (I think) majority of the EA university groups in South East Asia, have school terms going up to the week of the conference.

leillustrations🔸 16 May 2024 7:08 UTC
1 point
1 ∶ 0
on: reflections on smileys and how to make society’s interpretive priors more charitable
:)

leillustrations🔸 3 May 2024 11:45 UTC
1 point
2 ∶ 0
on: Why I’m doing PauseAI
If we are correct about the risk of AI, history will look kindly upon us (assuming we survive).
Perhaps not. It could be more like Y2K, where some believe problems were averted only by a great deal of effort and others believe there would have been minimal problems anyway.

leillustrations🔸 7 Apr 2024 1:46 UTC
5 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: James Herbert’s comment on: The 2nd Demographic Transition
I sometimes downvote comments and posts mostly because I think they have “too much” karma—comments and posts I might upvote or not vote on if they had less karma. As I look at the comment now it has 2 karma with 11 votes—maybe at some point it had more and people voted it back to 2?
I would have downvoted this comment if it had more karma because I think Deborah’s comment can be read as antagonistic: “utterly blind”, “dire state”, “for heaven’s sake!”, calling people ignorant. In this context I didn’t read it this way, but I often vote based on “what would the forum be like if all comments were more like this” rather than “what intentions do I think this person has”.

leillustrations🔸 7 Apr 2024 1:07 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 0
in reply to: Deborah W.A. Foulkes’s comment on: The 2nd Demographic Transition
Hi Deborah, I also disagree with this comment (and have disagree voted but not downvoted it). Here are some of my reasons:
- Without getting too much into it, I think the concerns with the population growth/technological change trend are somewhat distinct from problems relating to the current population size of the earth. One can be concerned that the population replacement rate is dropping too fast while also thinking that the current global population is too large.
- I think that, while the summarised breakdown you have under the overpopulation project link you have can be understood as broadly true (the specific link is broken), its imprecise, and the real picture is much more complicated. My understanding is that many estimate the carrying capacity of the earth to be 10 billion. If this estimate is true, then “large population, ecological sustainability and high human development” is possible if we define “large population” to be “8-10 billion people” and the other two factors in the same way that those who made the estimates defined them. I also think this picture does not consider the micro effects of aging populations, and papers over the important fact that the welfare of people in the least developed areas is not bottlenecked by planetary boundaries but the distribution of resources. Many effective altruists (myself included) also take a longtermist view which looks to expand sentient life beyond the earth.
- You present biodiversity and “balance” as ultimate goals, while I primarily think of the former as an instrumental goal and the latter as often ill-defined.
- I’m concerned about the long-run effects of the people most concerned with these issues collectively choosing to not have children. See discussion here.
- It’s not clear that human incursion into animal habitats is net-negative for wild animal welfare. See discussion here.
I also think it is unfair to call the post ‘utterly blind to the dire state of the biosphere and the existential risks we are creating for our species by pushing beyond the planetary boundaries’. Rather I think these concerns are outside the scope of this post.

leillustrations🔸 28 Mar 2024 8:15 UTC
3 points
1 ∶ 0
on: EA Forum feature suggestion thread
I think having a separate section for community posts has greatly improved my experience of the forum. However I think there are still quite a lot of posts that stay on the front page for a long time for similar reasons to why community posts did—because they ‘[interest] everyone at least a little bit’ and/or are ‘accessible to everyone, or on topics where everyone has an opinion’.
I want to see posts that do things like present the results of significant work get more attention, and to a lesser extent posts that are topical—i.e. announcements about recent news, events, and achievements also get more attention. I think these posts suffer from not having either of the above properties.
Could have filters/tags that promote these posts?

leillustrations🔸 27 Jan 2024 3:07 UTC
1 point
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund Ask Us Anything (January 2024)
I imagine there could be a useful office in a city with ~20 people using it regularly and ~100 people interested enough in EA to come to some events, and I wouldn’t think of that city as an “EA hub”.
I also think eg. a London office has much more value than an eg. an Oxford or Cambridge office (although I understand all three to be hubs), even though Oxford and Cambridge have a higher EA-density.

leillustrations🔸 26 Jan 2024 15:04 UTC
9 points
2 ∶ 2
in reply to: calebp’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund Ask Us Anything (January 2024)
located in an existing hub so that program participants have plenty of people outside the program to interact with
I don’t understand this consideration. It seems to me that people located in a place with a more robust existing community are the people that would counterfactually benefit the least from a place to interact with other EAs, because they have plenty of opportunities to do so already.
I’m assuming by “hub” you mean “EA hub”, but if by “hub” you mean “a place with high population density/otherwise a lot of people to talk to”, then this makes sense.
(Full disclosure: I was a grantee of CEEALAR last year; but I’m thinking about this in the context of non-residential office/co-working spaces like Meridian Office).

leillustrations🔸 27 Nov 2023 15:04 UTC
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: GWWC research team
Can you say more precisely what it means for a fund to be recommended? For instance, how should a donor compare giving to one of the “recommended funds” to giving to a specific charity or project directly? (and by extension one of GWWC’s new funds over a specific charity)

leillustrations🔸 27 Nov 2023 14:59 UTC
5 points
0 ∶ 0
on: AMA: GWWC research team
How did you choose the set of evaluators to evaluate—for instance, why evaluate LTFF and LLF over FP’s GCR fund? Were there other evaluators considered for the process but not evaluated?

leillustrations🔸 11 Nov 2023 10:01 UTC
12 points
5 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lizka’s comment on: Lizka’s Shortform
It’s kind of jarring to read that someone has been banned for “violating a norm”—that word to me implies that they’re informal agreements between the community. Why not call them “rules”?