lincolnq

Karma: 2,454

lincolnq 15 Sep 2014 16:21 UTC
10 points
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on: What small things can an EA do?
Practice thinking about EA related stuff in your daily life.

Even if you don’t always take the action, even just thinking about it can start to build the mental patterns which you will be able to follow later.
- What food would I order today if I were vegan?
- What job would I take today if I were earning to give?
- How would a utilitarian analyze this ethical dilemma?

lincolnq 15 Sep 2014 19:11 UTC
6 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread
Anti-aging focuses specifically on extending the “healthspan” of people (starting in the developed world, presumably) past the current point where age-related degenerative diseases start to eat into your QALYs.

It’s different from disease prevention because it operates higher than at the level of individual diseases, hoping to solve the underlying reasons why age is so strongly contributory to those diseases.

Anti-aging also tends to have absurdly high RFMF compared to most disease research, since it’s a “weird” idea that most people don’t like.

It also seems high impact: it would serve as a multiplier for any earlier-in-life health improvements as well as allowing some high-skill people to keep contributing to society (e.g., researchers who have accumulated lots of valuable knowledge and experience).

lincolnq 15 Sep 2014 19:27 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Open Thread
Obviously, if I’m going to die unless I eat that apple in the next ten minutes, the apple has extremely high value now and zero after 10 minutes.

Extending that idea, you are integrating across all the probabilities that the apple will become useless or reduce in value between now and when you’re going to get it.

Why is it exponential? Maybe stretching a bit, but I would guess that the apple changes in value according to a poisson process 1 where the dominating force is “the apple becomes useless to you”.

lincolnq 16 Sep 2014 14:49 UTC
7 points
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on: Open Thread
Make an extra effort to upvote people who make good contributions. There are a lot of people who are below the karma threshold for posting (including myself).

lincolnq 16 Sep 2014 14:51 UTC
13 points
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in reply to: Jess_Riedel’s comment on: Open Thread
Facebook is a terrible medium for discussion, so I hope everyone, or at least all the cool people, come over here and we have an active community. I don’t know if this will happen. I think this forum would be a good place for links with discussion and not just blog posts.

lincolnq 29 Sep 2014 21:13 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: Brainstorming thread: ideas for large EA funders
I suspect you are not “really trying” / putting in an exceptional effort into your side projects. Nascent EA projects seem like entrepreneurship in that the low hanging fruit tends to be picked, so they consistently require an exceptional, devoted effort in order to actually make the desired impact. If the person who’s working on an EA project is not devoting their life to it, I would generally expect the project to deliver average or below-average returns.

Basically, I think Ben Todd is right in that EA projects need devoted, exceptional management.

Further, I suspect some of these EA projects could be funded in a way which would generate a return for the fund. Many EA projects could be for-profit—maybe you would require the project to demonstrate a plausible opportunity for profit, at least in the early stages of the fund?

lincolnq 30 Sep 2014 5:07 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Ben Kuhn’s comment on: Brainstorming thread: ideas for large EA funders
Ok, fair enough.

Edit: I changed my mind. I think Harvard EA is probably a great example of low hanging fruit. I don’t know for sure whether someone else would have started it if you hadn’t, certainly not anytime soon, and it probably does make an impact (by increasing the “surface area” of EA).

(old comment which I no longer believe: “My tone came off wrong, didn’t mean to accuse you personally of ineffectiveness in side projects. Maybe you’re an exception—I haven’t been following your projects closely—but in general, I tend to think that it’s really really hard to do a really good job, the kind where one could hope to move the needle on a global scale, unless one is constantly obsessing over the problems.”)

lincolnq 8 Oct 2014 2:28 UTC
7 points
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in reply to: Jess_Whittlestone’s comment on: How a lazy eater went vegan
Currently, I beemind (using a Do Less goal) “non-vegan meals per week”. This has provided the mild positive pressure for me to choose to be vegan for most of my meals but allow myself to eat a few meals a week with friends without paying a social penalty.

lincolnq 29 Nov 2014 0:19 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Bitton’s comment on: Effective Altruism Blogs
Yes, it should be http://www.roxanneheston.com

lincolnq 13 May 2015 14:26 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Peter McIntyre’s comment on: Request for Feedback: Researching global poverty interventions with the intention of founding a charity.
But all those costs of RCTs are clearly worth it. Expensive? If your intervention is vaguely promising then EAs will throw enough money at you to get started. Time? Better get started now. Replication? More cost, EAs will fund. Outsource? Higher quality, EAs will fund.

lincolnq 11 Oct 2015 1:56 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Alexander’s comment on: EA Open Thread: October
I think the default explanation is that it’s surprisingly ineffective in practice to try for stuff that requires overcoming intelligent opposition. Obviously there are cases where this doesn’t apply, but it does seem reasonably sensible as a default, both from a decision-theoretic perspective and a practical perspective. You quote a 50x impact multiplier; I suppose it depends on how smart you think the opposition is, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable that a smart opposition would be able to reduce your impact by 50x.

lincolnq 11 Oct 2015 2:45 UTC
2 points
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on: EA Open Thread: October
I have a fear/uncertainty/doubt about excessive cause-prioritization as a focus of the Effective Altruism movement’s message.

Let’s say Tess goes to an Ivy League school and wants to make an impact through work in education. She does Teach for America and teaches underprivileged kids in the US for a few years, and gradually rises within the schools she works at until she is an administrator and can allocate resources for an entire district. Because she’s very good at it and deeply cares about her work, she ends up making an enormous impact with her career, transforming a bad public school system into a great one, and substantially positively affecting the lives of thousands of kids per year.

I think the EA movement would disapprove of the early steps in this career path. So if Tess discovered the current EA movement too early in her career, she would either become disenchanted with EA, or “drop out” of TFA and instead go earn-to-give, or something like that—i.e., follow a career path which is more approved by EAs, but ultimately less impactful. Of course, this would be justified since she would have no way to know that she has the “plot armor” to succeed at her original path. But by dropping out of something she is passionate about and doing earning-to-give, she is sacrificing her potential upside through the passion/resonance she has with her work.

I guess I worry about a lot of people saying such-and-such isn’t really EA because it doesn’t maximize a narrow ideal of “effectiveness”, and that can either turn people off of EA, or turn them off of careers in which they might actually have real upside through resonance.

lincolnq 13 May 2016 8:38 UTC
5 points
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on: $500 prize for anybody who can change our current top choice of intervention
I’m concerned about the SMS reminder thing for a weird reason: it looks too easy.

A number of reasons this is concerning—not sure which apply in this case since I don’t fully understand the process by which this list was created, but off the top of my head here they are:
1. The idea is so simple and “obvious” (yes, I know, retrospect) that there are probably lots of people who have tried various forms of it.
2. You may be subject to biases which cause it to look better than it is because you want the best interventions to be easy to execute.
3. There are no (obvious) schleps, which may be a corollary of #1 or #2, but it still seems concerning. From Paul Graham’s schlep blindness essay: “Most hackers who start startups wish they could do it by just writing some clever software, putting it on a server somewhere, and watching the money roll in—without ever having to talk to users, or negotiate with other companies, or deal with other people’s broken code. Maybe that’s possible, but I haven’t seen it.” Swap “money” for “QALYs” and “startups” for “organizations”. (http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html)
Again, this may indeed be a good idea despite the above. But my alarm bells are going off.

Edit: Further thoughts—unsure if this ever could become a GiveWell top charity. It seems like the “room for more funding” isn’t that high, because the impact of this project doesn’t seem blocked on money.

lincolnq 9 Oct 2016 11:37 UTC
4 points
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on: Is the community short of software engineers after all?
(I’m one of the founders of Wave.) Thanks for mentioning us!

We have indeed found it tricky to hire engineers. Our EA pedigree makes it easier though, since lots of people want to make an impact with their career; as does being a full distributed team so we can hire people from anywhere in the world. We’re exclusively hiring via our networks right now and the EA community has been quite helpful for us. Most of the engineers we’ve hired had heard of EA before joining, although I think not all. I don’t think many of them identify as explicitly EA (though a few do, myself included).

When we’ve rejected engineering candidates from the EA community, it’s been mainly for technical reasons (not enough experience or velocity doing the things we do), followed by cultural homogeneity risk. To expand on the latter risk: we often reject people who seem “too EA” because we are afraid of importing too much cultural baggage from an existing community—it would feel outgroupish if you didn’t know much about EA but there were all these EA memes flying around the slack channel. So far we’ve mostly avoided that.

That said, I don’t think anyone should self-exclude from our hiring process for being too EA; we can decide that for ourselves. Get in touch if you might be interested.

lincolnq 9 Oct 2016 11:45 UTC
3 points
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in reply to: Gregory Lewis’s comment on: Is the community short of software engineers after all?
At Wave, we offer market-ish for a startup ($90-180k for engineers depending on experience, plus equity). That said, several of the engineers we’ve hired took a substantial pay cut in nominal terms (usually from Google) to join us. Hopefully the equity will equalize or exceed the cut over time, but that’s always a risk. That said, I’m skeptical of anyone who says that an engineer “needs” a 150k salary to be happy; the marginal value of each extra $10k seems to drop dramatically around $70k and maybe more like around $100-120k if you have a family.

lincolnq 19 Oct 2016 15:54 UTC
3 points
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on: Ask MIRI Anything (AMA)
What do you think of OpenAI?

In particular, it seems like OpenAI has both managed to attract both substantial technical talent and a number of safety-conscious researchers.

1) It seems that, to at least some degree, you are competing for resources—particularly talent but also “control of the AI safety narrative”. Do you feel competitive with them, or collaborative, or a bit of both? Do you expect both organizations to be relevant for 5+ years or do you expect one to die off? What, if anything, would convince you that it would make sense to merge with them? What would convince them it was a good idea to merge with you?

2) Assuming you don’t merge, how does OpenAI’s existence change your strategy if at all?

lincolnq 14 Sep 2018 9:30 UTC
3 points
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on: Giving What We Can is still growing at a surprisingly good pace
I think you’re right that hiring your first staff/online signup put you onto the exponential curve. And you didn’t fall off of the exponential until you de-emphasized it—if you fit the exponential from 2014-2017 and extrapolate to today, you might hit something like 8000 members. So if you think staying on-curve seems plausible if you were to have continued working on it, I would guess that de-emphasizing growth still cost you users, even as you continued to grow linearly.

lincolnq 8 Nov 2018 10:34 UTC
6 points
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on: Burnout: What is it and how to Treat it.
Thanks Elizabeth, this is really useful. I’m happy you said such nice things about Wave, but I don’t know that they’re fully deserved; I worry about burnout (both in myself and our employees) constantly. This is great though.

lincolnq 28 Oct 2020 12:45 UTC
18 points
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in reply to: sella’s comment on: We’re Lincoln Quirk & Ben Kuhn from Wave, AMA!
From my perspective, for-profit entrepreneurship seems better than nonprofit entrepreneurship in terms of making an EA impact. The main reason is that the profit incentive gives you much broader access to capital, so it unlocks ideas that will only be impactful given enough money to get started. And I think there are a lot of ideas like this—it’s not hard to look at e.g. YC’s Requests for Startups and see obvious, huge-impact ideas that seem worth working on. (Linked from that page is another page about what YC looks for in a nonprofit, also a good read!)

I recommend that anyone wanting to start a company but not sure what to do, try looking at the Requests for Startups first and try to find something you have leverage on—but keep it small, your initial idea needs to start really “niche”, you won’t be able to solve a giant world problem from the get-go. Then read Paul Graham’s essays and Sam A’s startup playbook. Hopefully this literature will give you a better sense for whether entrepreneurship is for you. As you work on growing your business, don’t over-index on trying to make an EA impact early on—just focus on growth, like you would for any for-profit business. EA impact will come over time as you grow, and spending too much time worrying about the impact while you’re small is likely to be a distraction from growing as much as you can.

From my perspective, I wish more people would start software companies in Africa (presumably this is true for other places in the developing world). There’s a pretty wide appeal for lower-end tech optimized for consumers and businesses in these markets: low cost; Android-based; focused on mobile money.

(I also think nonprofit entrepreneurship is great in lots of ways, and in general I want to see people in EA putting energy behind all forms of innovation!)

All the above notwithstanding, it seems like it makes sense for EA orgs like 80000 hours not to spend much energy pushing people into for-profit entrepreneurship: there’s a model going around that the best entrepreneurs are driven enough that you don’t need to tell them to be an entrepreneur—it’s in their blood or something :). I am not myself too convinced this should be the blocker—I go around telling all my friends to start companies—but if that’s the working assumption, then they are probably acting correctly.
What links here?
- jared_m's comment on EA outreach to high school competitors by Nikola (18 Dec 2021 13:46 UTC; 2 points)

lincolnq 28 Oct 2020 12:54 UTC
5 points
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in reply to: Linch’s comment on: We’re Lincoln Quirk & Ben Kuhn from Wave, AMA!
1. Yes, I speak French, although not quite fluently. It’s enough to interact with customers and agents in a pinch, but when I go out to do serious user research, I bring someone from our team who has better language skills. The language barrier is significant, and I would say somewhat hurts our ability to design the best possible products—we’ve done a lot to overcome it though, and it’s not one of our biggest bottlenecks at this point. Now our team is big enough that I don’t even do that much user research on my own, and all the product managers I manage speak fluent or native French, so it’s easier for them :)
  
  Before Senegal, we did a lot of our initial user research in Ethiopia, which had a greater proportion of English-speakers, and it was easier to get started there.
(I’ll let Ben answer the internet-related ones)