Lizka

Karma: 16,930

I’m a researcher at Forethought; before that, I ran the non-engineering side of the EA Forum (this platform), ran the EA Newsletter, and worked on some other content-related tasks at CEA. [More about the Forum/CEA Online job.]

Selected posts

Background

I finished my undergraduate studies with a double major in mathematics and comparative literature in 2021. I was a research fellow at Rethink Priorities in the summer of 2021 and was then hired by the Events Team at CEA. I later switched to the Online Team. In the past, I’ve also done some (math) research and worked at Canada/USA Mathcamp.

Lizka Jan 25, 2024, 7:33 AM
7 points
1 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Rates of Criminality Amongst Giving Pledge Signatories
We explored related questions briefly for “Are there diseconomies of scale in the reputation of communities?”, for what it’s worth (although we didn’t focus on donors specifically). See e.g. this section.
Just focusing on the reputational effects, my quick guess is that the extent to which a donor/public figure is ~memetically connected to the movement/charity is really important, and I expect that most Giving Pledge signatories are significantly less connected to the Giving Pledge (or American higher education donors to American higher education) than the biggest ~5 EA donors are to EA. (Note that “EA donor is also a poorly defined category.) Without considering this factor, we might conclude that getting more donors adds significantly/unchangeably to ~scandal-based risk levels, or that the number of donors is the key thing to consider. I think this would be a false conclusion; more donors probably means that each is less central (which I think would also have the benefit of reducing the influence of any given donor) and because the public profile of the donor(s) probably matters a lot. (I do think there are separate ethical issues and considerations involved in taking funding from UHNW donors.)

Lizka Jan 19, 2024, 4:45 AM
9 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Report on the Desirability of Science Given New Biotech Risks
Thanks a bunch for this report! I haven’t had the time to read it very carefully, but I’ve already really enjoyed it and am curating the post.
I’m also sharing some questions I have, my highlights, and my rough understanding of the basic model setup (pulled from my notes as I was skimming the report).
A couple of questions / follow-up discussions
1. I’m curious about why you chose to focus specifically on biological risks.
  1. I expect that it’s usually good to narrow the scope of reports like this and you do outline the scope at the beginning,^[1] but I’d be interested in hearing more about why you didn’t, for instance, focus on risks from AI. (I guess
  2. (For context, in the XPT, risks from AI are believed to be higher than risks from engineered pathogens.)
2. I’d be interested in a follow-up discussion^[2] on this: “My preferred policy stance … is to separately and in parallel pursue reforms that accelerate science and reforms that reduce risks from new technologies, without worrying too much about their interaction (with some likely rare exceptions).”
  1. In particular, I mostly like the proposal, but have some worries. It makes sense to me that it’s generally good to pursue different goals separately^[3] But sometimes^[4] it does turn out that at-first-seemingly-unrelated side-considerations (predictably) swamp the original consideration. Your report is an update against this being the case for scientific progress and biological risk, but I haven’t tried to estimate what your models (and XPT forecasts I suppose) would predict for AI risk.
  2. I also have the intuition that there’s some kind of ~collaborativeness consideration like: if you have goals A and B (and, unlike in this report, you don’t have an agreed-on exchange rate between them), then you should decide to pursue A and B separately only if the difference in outcomes from A’s perspective between B-optimized actions and A-and-B-compromise actions is comparable to or smaller than the outcomes of A-optimized actions.
    To use an example: if I want to have a career that involves traveling while also minimizing my contribution to CO2 levels or something, then I should probably just fly and donate to clean tech or verified carbon offsets or something, because even from the POV of CO2 levels that’s better. But if it turns out that flying does more damage than the change I can make by actively improving CO2 levels, then maybe I should find a way to travel less or err on the side of trains or the like. (I think you can take this too far, but maybe there’s a reasonable ground here.)
    More specifically I’m wondering if we can estimate the impact of AI/biosafety interventions, compared to possible harms.
3. I’m somewhat uncertain about why you model the (biological) time of perils (ToP) the way you do (same with the impact of “pausing science” on ToP).
  1. I was initially most confused about why only the start date of the ToP moves back because of a science-pause, and assumed it was either because you assumed that ToP was indefinite or because it would end for a reason not very affected by the rate of scientific progress. Based on the discussion in one of the sections, I think that’s not quite right? (You also explore the possibility of ToP contracting due to safety-boosting scientific advances, which also seems to contradict my earlier interpretation.)
  2. This also led to me wondering what would happen if the risk grew over the course of ToP a growing risk (d), as opposed to going from 0 to d (e.g. there’s some chance of a new unlocked dangerous biotechnology at any point once ToP starts) — and how that would affect the results? (Maybe you do something like this somewhere!)
Some things that were highlights to me
1. In the comparison of superforecaster and expert answers in XPT, the “Correlated pessimism” consideration was particularly interesting and more compelling than I expected it to be before I read it!
  1. ″...general pessimism and optimism among groups in ways that imply biases. [....] We also see a high degree of correlation in beliefs about catastrophic risk even for categories that seem likely to be uncorrelated. For example, [for the probability that non-anthropogenic causes (e.g. asteroids) cause catastrophes] the third of respondents most concerned about AI risk [...] foresaw a 0.14% chance of such a catastrophe by 2100. The third of respondent least concerned foresaw a 0.01% chance, more than an order of magnitude less. [...]” Then there’s discussion of selection effects — pessimists about catastrophic risks might become experts in the field — and an argument that overly optimistic superforecasters would get corrective feedback that too-pessimistic risk experts might lack.
2. Also in the XPT discussions (S 4.1), I liked the extrapolation for the current/future ~engineered pandemic peril rates and for a date for the onset of the time of perils.^[5]
3. I thought the “leveling the playing field” consideration was useful and something I probably haven’t considered enough, particularly in bio: ”… the faster is scientific progress, the greater is the set of defensive capabilities, relative to offensive ones. Conversely, a slowdown in the rate of scientific progress (which is arguably underway!) reduces safety by “leveling the playing field” between large and small organizations.” (Related: multipolar AI scenarios)
4. Factoids/estimates I thought were interesting independent of the rest of the report:
  1. 56% of life expectancy increases are attributed to science effects in this paper (see S4.8), which, together with average increases in life expectancy means that a year of science increases our lifespans by around 0.261% (i.e. multiply by ~1.0026 every year). (For the impacts of science on utility via increased incomes, the paper estimates a per-year increase of 0.125%.)
  2. “In 2020, for example, roughly 1 in 20-25 papers published was related to Covid-19 in some way (from essentially none in 2019).”
  3. You conclude that: “Roughly half the value comes from technologies that make these people just a tiny bit richer, in every year, for a long time to come. The other half comes from technologies that make people just a tiny bit healthier, again in every year, for a long time to come.” I don’t know if I would have expected the model to predict such an even split.
  4. “Omberg and Tabarrok (2022) [examine] the efficacy of different methods of preparing for a biocatastrophe; specifically, the covid-19 pandemic. The study takes as its starting point the Global Health Security Index, which was completed in 2019, shortly before the onset of the pandemic. This index was designed by a large panel of experts to rate countries on their capacity to prevent and mitigate epidemics and pandemics. Omberg and Tabarrok examine how the index, and various sub-indices of it, are or are not correlated with various metrics of success in the covid-19 pandemic, mostly excess deaths per capita. The main conclusion is that almost none of the indices were correlated with covid-19 responses, whether those metrics related to disease prevention, detection, response, or the capacity of the health system.”
My rough understanding of the basic setup of the main(?) model
(Please let me know if you see an error! I didn’t check this carefully.)
1. Broad notes:
  1. “Time of (biological) perils” is a distinct period, which starts when the annual probability a biocatastrophe jumps.
  2. The primary benefits of science that are considered are income and health boosts (more income means more utility per person per year, better health means lower mortality rates).
  3. I think the quality of science that happens or doesn’t happen at different times is assumed to be ~always average.
2. The “more sophisticated model” described in S3.1 compares total utility (across everyone on earth, from now until eternity) under two scenarios: “status quo” and a year-long science “pause.”
3. Future utility is discounted relative to present/near-future utility, mostly for epistemic reasons (the further out we’re looking, the more uncertainty we have about what the outcomes will be). This is modeled by assuming a constant annual probability that the world totally stops being predictable (it enters a “new epistemic regime”); utility past that point does not depend on whether we accelerate science or not and can be set aside for the purpose of this comparison— see S3.2 and 4.2^[6]
4. Here’s how outcomes differ in the two scenarios, given that context:
  1. In the status quo scenario, current trends continue (this is the baseline).
  2. In the “pause science” scenario, science is “turned off” for a year, which has a delayed impact by:
    Delaying the start of the time of perils by a year (without affecting the end-date of the time of perils, if there is one)
    Slowing growth for the duration of a year starting time T
    I.e. after the pause things continue normally for a while, then slow down for a year, and then go back up after the year has passed. In the model, pausing science slows the decline in mortality for a year but doesn’t affect birth rates. Given some assumptions, this means that pausing science pushes the decline in mortality permanently behind where it should be, so population growth rates slow (forever, with the discount rate p as a caveat) after the effects kick in.
    Note that T is also taken to be the time at which the time of perils would start by default — there’s a section discussing what happens if the time of perils starts earlier or later than T that argues that we should expect pausing science to look worse in either scenario.
1. ^
  S 2.2. “Synthetic biology is not the only technology with the potential to destroy humanity—a short list could also include nuclear weapons, nanotechnology, and geoengineering. But synthetic biology appears to be the most salient at the moment. [...]”
2. ^
  Although I might not be able to respond much/fast in the near future
3. ^
  Most actions targeted at some goal A affect a separate goal B way less than an action that was taken because it targeted goal B would have affected B. (I think this effect is probably stronger if you filter by “top 10% most effective actions targeted at these goals, assuming we believe that there are huge differences in impact.) If you want to spend 100 resource units for goals A and B you should probably just split the resources and target the two things separately instead of trying to find things that look fine for both A and B.
  (I think the “barbell strategy” is a related concept, although I haven’t read much about it.)
4. ^
  (for some reason the thing that comes to mind is this SSC post about marijuana legalization from 2014 — I haven’t read it in forever but remember it striking a chord)
5. ^
  Seems like around the year 2038, the superforecasters expect a doubling of annual mortality rates from engineered pandemics from 0.0021% to 0.0041% — around 1 COVID every 48 years — and a shift from ~0% to ~0.0002%/year extinction risk. The increases are assumed to persist (although there were only forecasts until 2100?).
6. ^
  4.2 is a cool collection of different approaches to identifying a discount rate. Ultimately the author assumes p=0.98, which is on the slightly lower end and which he flags will put more weight on near-term events.
  I think p can also be understood to incorporate a kind of potential “washout” aspect of scientific progress today (if we don’t discover what we would have in 2024, maybe we still mostly catch up in the next few years), although I haven’t thought carefully about it.

Lizka Jan 18, 2024, 4:29 AM
87 points
1 ∶ 0
on: Lizka’s Shortform
USAID has announced that they’ve committed $4 million to fighting global lead poisoning!
USAID Administrator Samantha Power also called other donors to action, and announced that USAID will be the first bilateral donor agency to join the Global Alliance to Eliminate Lead Paint. The Center for Global Development (CGD) discusses the implications of the announcement here.
For context, lead poisoning seems to get ~$11-15 million per year right now, and has a huge toll. I’m really excited about this news.
Also, thanks to @ryancbriggs for pointing out that this seems like “a huge win for risky policy change global health effective altruism” and referencing this grant:
In December 2021, GiveWell (or the EA Funds Global Health and Development Fund?) gave a grant to CGD to “to support research into the effects of lead exposure on economic and educational outcomes, and run a working group that will author policy outreach documents and engage with global policymakers.” In their writeup, they recorded a 10% “best case” forecast that in two years (by the end of the grant period), “The U.S. government, other international actors (e.g., bilateral and multilateral donors), and/or national LMIC governments take measurable action to reduce lead exposure—for example, through increased funding for lead mitigation and research, increased monitoring of lead exposure, and/or enactment of regulations.” We’ve reached this best case and it’s been almost exactly two years! (Attributing credit is really hard and I have no experience and little context in this area — as far as I know this could have happened without that grant or related advocacy. But it’s still notable to me that a CGD report is cited in Power’s announcement.)

Lizka Jan 17, 2024, 7:47 PM
11 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Chris Leong’s comment on: EA Infrastructure Fund Ask Us Anything (January 2024)
Semi-relatedly, I’d also be interested in hearing about some of EAIF’s past grants that you think were particularly exciting/successful (this might have already gotten covered in one of the other posts — apologies if so!).

Lizka Jan 11, 2024, 7:18 PM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Economic Growth—Donation suggestions and ideas
I appreciate the discussion here and am curating this post. (Thanks for getting the ball rolling!) Some related things I think I’d like to see:
1. More comparisons between the options discussed here (e.g. how good are some pro-immigration options, or even an idealized pro-immigration option, relative to something like GiveDirectly, targeted agricultural productivity research/investment, or governance improvements?)
2. More discussion about and estimates of the actual value of donations aimed at boosting economic growth
  1. Donations vs. other approaches
    E.g. maybe the bottleneck tends to be in specialized knowledge (e.g. research based on a deep understanding of key economic factors for LMICs) or other kinds of “direct work” that might be hard to buy via more funding
    Or maybe it’s hard for people from outside major LMICs to fund the most promising work
  2. How much it’s worth prioritizing work in this area at all (and how to approach that) — e.g. a continuation of the discussion in this podcast (skip to section):
    Elie Hassenfeld: “We’ve spoken a number of times with Lant Pritchett, who is a leading academic proponent of these ideas. We’ve looked for specific organisations we could support that are focused on growth specifically. [...] we looked at that level and we’re not super optimistic about the opportunities that we considered. [...] It’s also a question of how you would attack this philanthropically — like I also wonder how neglected this space truly is. There’s the World Bank, IMF, there’s other institutions. There are the Washington think tanks that are definitely focused on economic growth, and academics who focus on macroeconomics and how we can improve low-income country conditions. [...] I think my story would be more that we do know some things that countries should really avoid. I think people are working on that. This is not a totally neglected space. Then there is some degree of disagreement among the different groups working on this about what the right approaches are. Some of the evidence for that is a disagreement about the extent to which past efforts have been effective and to what extent. [...] It strikes me that there’s more of a risk of doing harm here, by assuming that we do have the answer and pushing economic policy in a certain direction. [...] I also think there are some more detailed things. I think Alexander Berger actually raises this in the comments, that when you’re modelling the effect of GDP, you might want to look at log GDP instead of straight GDP. That is a big effect as you look at the big benefits of the very big numbers. I suspect those are smaller, in terms of their effect on the overall argument, but important nonetheless.
3. Discussion of the implications of forecasted AI progress, e.g. more like Could AI accelerate economic growth? (or this report or this discussion—both from 2021)
  1. More generally, I’m interested in more like: How does AI progress affect other EA cause areas?
  2. Note that I think AI progress might go catastrophically and I find it hard to think about the potential benefits while still considering potential harms. I really like The costs of caution.

2023: highlights from the year, from the EA Newsletter

LizkaJan 5, 2024, 9:57 PM

68 points

2 comments33 min readEA link

2023: news on AI safety, animal welfare, global health, and more

LizkaJan 5, 2024, 9:57 PM

54 points

1 comment12 min readEA link

Lizka Jan 2, 2024, 4:54 AM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Lachlan Earnshaw’s comment on: Open Thread: October—December 2023
I’m not sure how many volunteer opportunities like this there are, but I’d check the EA Opportunity Board, which collects “everything short of permanent positions” (see Airtable — the normal interface seems broken for me right now). You should be able to filter “opportunity type” for volunteering, and “location filter” by whatever works for you (or not remote). (See also the 80K job board, which doesn’t tend to focus on volunteer opportunities.)
You might also be interested in exploring events.

Open thread: January—March 2024

LizkaJan 2, 2024, 4:41 AM

23 points

37 comments1 min readEA link

Lizka Dec 27, 2023, 8:31 AM
8 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Zach Stein-Perlman’s comment on: Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)
Thanks! I agree that the approach you describe is optimal under very reasonable assumptions, but I think in practice few people used it (the median ratio between someone’s top choice and their second choice was 2, the mean if you throw out one outlier was ~20; only 7 people voted for at least 2 candidates and had ratios between their top two that were at least 20). Moreover, we had some^[1] voters who didn’t vote the way you describe, but who did assign a fairly big number of projects similar small point values — I think kind of throwing in some points for charities they don’t favor that much, and I didn’t want to overweight their votes in the way I tallied the RCV-translated (or approval-translated) scores.
Still, I agree that my translations are bad — I should at least represent scores from people who basically approximated RCV in the current voting method the way they would be counted in RCV. I might try this (and think about what translation actually makes sense — just the top 10 charities people voted for?) later, but might not prioritize doing it.
For approval voting, you could also just look at the number of voters who gave a charity any (positive) number of points; these counts are included in this post and wouldn’t have changed the top 3.
1. ^
  Quickly estimating: there were 90 voters who voted for at least 4 candidates whose last two votes differed by a ratio of less than 1.5. There were 27 if instead of requiring at least 4 candidates, you require that the smallest point assignment is <5.
  Or looking at it another way: across all ratios (across all voters) between what a given voter gave the candidate they ranked N and the candidate they ranked N+1, if we remove only the top 1 percentile of ratios (removing because a few people did use an approximation of RCV—equivalent in this case to removing ratios higher than 100:1), the mean is 2. Across all ~12K ratios, about 500 are exactly 1.

Lizka Dec 27, 2023, 3:00 AM
42 points
4 ∶ 0
on: A year of wins for farmed animals
I’m curating this post — and I’d love to see more reflections on 2023 from other perspectives and fields. (Thanks for cross-posting it!)
...all advocacy for farmed animals globally has a combined budget smaller than the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art. And yet we’ve already achieved progress for billions of sentient beings.
This is wild. I wanted to find some estimates; it looks like this report estimates that around $200M was spent on farmed animal welfare in 2020 (with around 10% growth per year, and not counting industry investments into alt proteins), which makes things look pretty close to the Met’s budget.
Some semi-related posts you might appreciate if you appreciated this one:
- Broad reflections:
  - EA’s success no one cares about (by Jakub Stencel, from June)
  - Let’s celebrate some wins (October), last year’s version of this newsletter, and another recent win: The Belgian senate votes to add animal welfare to the constitution
- Reflections on failed policy reforms / initiatives:
  - EU considers dropping stricter animal welfare measures, see also more discussion here (in the comments) — I would love to see more about this and how we should update on the Forum
  - Abolishing factory farming in Switzerland: Postmortem
- Other interesting animal welfare content:
  - Animal Advocacy Strategy Forum 2023 Summary (November)
  - A Cost-Effectiveness Analysis of Historical Farmed Animal Welfare Ballot Initiatives (June)
  - Open Phil Should Allocate Most Neartermist Funding to Animal Welfare (November), and a response with some discussion
  - Ideas on potential approaches, like eliminating the New World screwworm, policy wins via minor political parties,
- Related opportunities:
  - The EA Animal Welfare Fund (Once Again) Has Significant Room For More Funding (recommended by GWWC)
  - You can explore retrospectives and/or funding gap information from The Humane League, Fish Welfare Initiative, Shrimp Welfare Project, and others
  - Call for abstracts on the economics of animal welfare (deadline: 15 January)
As a side note, I feel conflicted about the post’s title (or newsletter’s subject line); the first sentence seems to disagree with the title and I don’t know if I’d characterize the year as “a year of wins for farmed animals.” (E.g. my sense is that the number of chickens kept in extreme confinement has increased globally, and the trend isn’t changing.) I think it can be very useful to focus on wins sometimes, but I’d change the title to something like “some big wins for farmed animals.”
Finally,
None of this progress just happened. Almost all of it came thanks to the tireless work of advocates, enabled by the generosity of donors. Many of both read this newsletter. So let me say: I’m deeply grateful for all you do.
+1 from me. (Bold mine.)

Lizka Dec 26, 2023, 11:17 PM
3 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: OscarD🔸’s comment on: Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)
Someone else I talked to is also in favor of RCV, and I agree that it has benefits (e.g. easier to use than this system), but I also think it has some downsides — e.g. I think it’s a worse exercise for voters than this system is. Btw, you might also be interested in the discussion that happened on my quick take before we decided on a voting system.
(My current top, low-resilience guess about changes we should make to the voting system, if we ran this again, is that we should remove the 3-winner restriction and that we should think about trying to get people to vote on cause/problem areas — separate from voting on charities.)

Lizka Dec 26, 2023, 1:21 AM
4 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Jason’s comment on: Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)
I agree that this is hard with available data. I guess we could try to look at donation data e.g. from here or responses to this post and see how well it matches what people collectively voted for (ideally weighted by ~Forum engagement), but both groups are probably pretty different from the voting group (and the second group is small). A lot of comments on why people voted the way they did also noted something about why they’re donating to the candidates they voted for (but definitely not all comments).
Also:
- A lot of people probably donated to charities or projects that weren’t candidates (including me, although I did also donate to something I think I gave some points to)
- There are ~strategic reasons for voting for charities you aren’t donating to (e.g. it’s not clear (to me) if you should split donations or how much, but if you’ve thought a fair bit about different candidates, you probably want to give points to multiple candidates)

Lizka Dec 26, 2023, 1:08 AM
5 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: OscarD🔸’s comment on: Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)
Thanks for bringing this up! I actually explored this a bit, but hid it in a footnote:
Interestingly, I think approval voting would have yielded similar winners (with a big assumption about how to extrapolate what people would have “approved” of) — if you rank projects by the number of voters who gave it at least 10%, for instance, the picture doesn’t change much (if you increase from 10% to 20%, LTFF starts showing up in the top 3 again).
What would have happened with ranked-choice voting is [more] unclear to me; the voting system was in fact very different, and my quick attempts at trying to see what would happen if I tried to interpret the scores as ranks were extremely contingent on minor tweaks in how I interpret things and on decisions like whether I used “rankings” of all the candidates or only the top 10, etc. If I only rank points given when they amount to over 5% of a voter’s total points and add some randomness to produce rankings out of equal scores, the results look fairly similar, but I didn’t do things carefully.
I was initially lazier with ranked-choice voting, but now finished a rough ~run of the elimination process and got very similar results as what we got with our voting system. Note that I chose the 5% cutoff as the thing that seemed most reasonable given how people voted before I saw the results with this translation into RCV, but things might in fact still change quite a bit if you choose a different translation into RCV (e.g. only the top 5 projects people gave points to, instead of the projects people gave at least 5% of their points to). The ranking I got was:
1. RP
2. CE’s Fund
3. AWF (very close call; I had added some randomness to get orderings and on some reloads it was beating CE, but that seemed rarer than CE beating AWF)
4. LTFF
5. GW
6. GD
7. AMF
8. THL
9. GFI
10. ALLFED
11. Etc.
(Please don’t trust these results too much, though; I was not careful here.)
Re quadratic voting, see also here.

Lizka Dec 26, 2023, 12:52 AM
7 points
0 ∶ 0
in reply to: Vasco Grilo🔸’s comment on: Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)
I want to be really careful about not de-anonymizing voters (even internally), but I’ll see what we can check safely.
Re: the number of voters: I’m not sure. I wish more people had voted, but it’s generally quite hard to get people to do things (see e.g. the 1% rule and its variants), and this is not outside of my expectations.^[1] We probably could have done more to advertise the election; I’d include that in lessons for next time (although I also think that, if the Forum runs another election in a year, there’ll be more natural interest as this will be a more established “thing”).
Some reasons I expect people didn’t vote: people thought they were ~unqualified (I heard this worry and tried to push back on it here, but could probably do better in the future), they just weren’t interested (e.g. because they didn’t think this is relevant, or their favorite projects weren’t candidates) or didn’t have time, they just didn’t hear about the election, or they meant to do it and never got around to it.
I should also flag that a lot of monthly active Forum users are ~weekly users, I think, and I expect that those are significantly less likely to vote. You can see this chart from the Forum survey we ran a while back (I’m hoping to share a writeup on it soon), which sort of illustrates this (it’s a bit iffy because (1) the Forum survey will overrepresent more frequent users — although that arguably boosts my point, and (2) this question had an issue where people who use the Forum ~3 times a month don’t really have an obvious answer to give, but oh well):
1. ^
  We (Online Team) had some very casual internal forecasts on how many voters we’d get. I had initially (late November) put 50% for getting to 400 voters (most other people on the team were lower), then went higher as we got closer to that goal, and lower again later when voting slowed down. (We also had forecasts for 200 and 100; I had started with 80% and 90% there.)

Lizka Dec 24, 2023, 1:59 AM
29 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)
I really loved people’s comments on why they voted the way they did, but this post is already quite long, so I’m sharing a longer list of excerpts as a sort of “Appendix Comment.”
Why people voted the way they did (& other highlights from the comments) - extended edition
“Realized I’m too partial to [global health] and biased against animal welfare, [so I committed to vote for the] most effective animal organization. Rethink’s post was very convincing. CE has the most innovative ideas in GHD and it isn’t close. GiveWell is GiveWell.”
— Someone who voted for all 3 winning orgs (and GiveWell).
We asked voters if they wanted to share a note about why they voted the way they did (or something else). 74 people (~20%) wrote a comment. Some excerpts are slightly tweaked for clarity/length and/or to avoid highly recognizable styles (please reach out if you’re worried and would like me to remove your comment).
See the shortened version in the post above — this is the extended version. There’s a bit of repetition, but I think most of it is new.
Rethink Priorities’s funding request post was mentioned a lot to explain why someone is donating to or voting for RP. People also noted specific aspects of RP’s work or approach that they appreciate:
- “I found the request for funding from Rethink priorities quite compelling, I value their work, in particular the annual survey they run.”
- “I think Rethink Priorities create many public benefits.” (And someone else: “… [RP] are quite productive with the resources they have, and provide a good service to the EA community in terms of generalist-style research on cause areas.”)
- “Reading about [RP’s] plans to do more moral weights and animal welfare work in the coming year and how this depended on marginal funding.”
- “Fish Welfare & Rethink because I think they work on the relatively most neglected current problems, where marginal contributions seriously matter. Global health out of personal interest (but I gave them a much weaker weight).”
- “I prioritized animal welfare charities, especially ones that focus on neglected groups of animals like Rethink Priorities and Wild Animal Initiative.”
- “I think of [my top choices] as driving growth in either knowledge or funding, mostly for [global health and development] or EA as a whole.” (From someone who gave points to many projects, with the most going to RP, CE, and GWWC)
- Someone mentioned this market.
- “ALLFED and Rethink Priorities both consist of highly talented and motivated individuals that are working on high-potential, high-impact projects. Both organizations have left a strong impression on me in terms of their approach to reasoning and problem solving. [...] Both organizations have recently posted extremely well-detailed [updates on their financial situation and how additional funding would help]. [...]”
CE’s Incubated Charities Fund (and Charity Entrepreneurship more broadly) got a lot of appreciation for their good and/or unusual ideas and track record:
- “Outstanding teams and track record” (from someone who gave most of their points to CE’s Fund and some to RP)
- “...direct-action global health charities need more funding now, especially in light of reductions in future funding from Open Phil. [And] there’s enough potential upside to charity incubation to put a good bit of money there.”
- “[AWF], because I was convinced by the post about how animal welfare dominates in non-longtermist causes, [CE], so that there can be even more excellent ways of making the world a better place by donating, [GWWC], because I wish we had unlimited money to give to all the others”
- “The Forum’s Giving Season inspired me to choose some additional places to donate in addition to my usual GiveWell donation.” (RP, CE)
- “[CE and THL] are actually doing something rather than “analysis”, and have great track records.”
- Someone who gave points to CE’s Fund, EAIF, GWWC, and others wrote that they wanted to “support funds or [organizations] that have exponential impact through their work”
- “I lean longtermist but feel like [some orgs’] salaries are too high and more frugal [orgs] like Charity Entrepreneurship are more cost-effective.”
A number of people wrote that they’d updated towards donating to animal welfare as a result of recent discussions (often explicitly because of this post). Many gave a lot of their points to the Animal Welfare Fund, sometimes explicitly citing GWWC’s evaluations of the evaluators. Some also said they wanted to vote for animal welfare to correct for its relative neglectedness in EA or to emphasize that it has a central place in EA:
- “I voted for animal charities to [...] direct the money to where it can do a lot of good, but also to demonstrate to the EA community that *animal welfare belongs as a central EA cause area.* As an EA working on AI risk, I feel very deeply that this community should continue to stand up for sentient beings who are experiencing unimaginable suffering now. [...] Why these particular animal welfare donations [ACE, THL, AWF]? I want to strengthen central institutions in animal welfare so that they can in turn use their best judgment to distribute funds among tried-and-tested and speculative giving opportunities.”
- “I think the median EA underweights animal stuff, so I’m throwing all my points towards ACE Movement Grants.”
- “[Gave a lot more points to animal welfare than human health and development] because [the latter is] much less cost-effective than animal welfare: [link to this post]. Gave [fewer points to longtermist candidates] since factory farming could continue if we prevent a catastrophe...”
- “...my vote was mostly [based on] thinking a lot of people would put money on longtermist options. My vote goes to keeping a lot of money on the more consensual areas of the movement (poverty & animal rights; it’s true they get a lot of money during this time, but most of it, we know, is not effectively given).”
- “I weakly believe helping non-human animals is probably more cost-effective than helping humans, and GCR-reduction projects seem [uncertain, hard to evaluate, and not capital-constrained right now]. [GWWC] tentatively evaluates the EA Animal Welfare fund as probably more cost-effective than ACE, which is consistent with conversations I had…” (the reference)
- “...I have struggled for years to come up with a ratio I can defend [of human vs. animal donations]. So I just use a [heuristic] and always donate 80% to the charity I think is ‘current best human/animal charity.’ This is why the EA Animal Welfare Fund is currently at 80%… I used to [allocate 80%] to SCI but posts on the Forum have convinced me animal welfare as a field is more funding constrained right now, [so] my marginal dollar means more [and SCI wasn’t on the list]. I am a fan of hits-based giving… AWF [might not pan out], but might also uncover extraordinary potential. I am quite bullish on funding animal welfare efforts in geographically neglected areas or on neglected groups of animals, but I think this is best done the same way VC Investing works: fund a lot of opportunities — even some speculative ones — and then a few gems [will make up for] losses. In a way you could see this 80% as analogous to ‘medium-high risk equity ETF’ in my giving portfolio.”
- “Some recent conversations and readings have swayed me in the direction of large-scale suffering reduction for animals being neglected.”
And here are some comments about why people gave points or donated to other candidates, or other considerations people shared:
- “I feel like big charities get a lot of attention and smaller charities don’t always get enough. But they still do important work.” (Someone who gave points to AWF, but also FWI, WAI, ACE Movement Grants, and Faunalytics.)
- “I prefer helping other humans rise over poverty, disease and suffering… once we can help a majority of people come out of poverty and live without [danger], we should collectively focus on other animals.” (AMF, GD, and others.)
- “AI x-risk seems clearly the most important and highest expected value. Wild Animal Initiative is a huge neglected need and maybe investing a bit more in it might have a positive impact on AI x-risk too.” (LTFF, WAI, and others)
- “I allocated [my points] in adjustment from an estimate of EA dollars by cause area. I made it 4:1 for animal welfare to global health because of a post I read, and made MIRI and ALLFED about 80% of longtermist funding (40% each) when I read that ALLFED could be more effective than AI safety. Since many people in the EA community have confidence in AI safety being the most important cause, I wasn’t ready to put ALLFED quite over the mark until more research is done. I put The Humane League as 80% of animal welfare funding, because of the 10 million dollar funding gap. When I didn’t have time to research, I just distributed funds evenly within a cause area.” I think they’re referencing this post on animal welfare and possibly this post re: ALLFED (or posts linked in it).
- “I don’t normally donate anything to ‘meta’ work like research or fundraising, but thinking about a larger pot of money, I wanted to give some to the best of those [areas]” (GW, RP, some others)
- “I prioritize longtermism, and I think that we might be able to influence how AI treats wild animals (e.g. in simulations). I generally have picked organizations that have a lot of room for more funding...” (ALLFED, RP, WAI)
- “...saving lives does not seem as urgent to me as mitigating suffering. GiveDirectly has for years to me seemed like a better [bet] with regard to a mitigating long-term suffering perspective. GiveDirectly is [the] rock-solid input-output play […] in my portfolio.”
- “[ALLFED] seems like the only x-risk-focused charity where marginal dollars from individual donors matter a lot. [Others seem much more] talent-constrained. … [And they’re working on a relatively neglected set of problems in x-risk.]”
- Someone who gave most of their points to MIRI said they “expect Yudkowsky & Soares will select the best grantmakers [...] to spend their money…” Another MIRI voter (who also gave points to EAIF and LTFF) said they wished some projects were candidates that aren’t, and that they hoped MIRI would donate to those projects and other theoretical researchers, as they prioritize fundamental AI alignment work.
- “I am pretty longtermist so I favored those organizations, but I also wanted to put some options on the board from a wide variety of cause areas due to the nature of the ranked choice voting — i.e., in case longtermist charities all lost out and the winners were dominated by animal welfare, I at least wanted to express an opinion on which animal-welfare charities seem best to me.”
- “I included GWWC after I noticed the community is not paying enough attention to Earning to Give and the growth of GWWC pledges have stagnated over the last few years.”
Broader patterns:
- A number of people said they work in one field (often existential risk reduction) but want to donate or direct at least some funding to a different field (often global health, animal welfare, or cross-cause charities), either because they believe those causes need funding more (while others might need labor more) or because they wanted to split their/EA resources across causes. Some also explicitly wanted to split their vote across causes. E.g.:
  - “As an EA working on AI risk, I feel very deeply that this community should continue to stand up for sentient beings who are experiencing unimaginable suffering now.”
  - “…and THL and GFI as I think they represent good orgs working on short-term causes. … I prioritise short-term causes slightly less than catastrophic risks at present, but think it is important for a portfolio approach to funding.” (Someone who also said they work for a specific risk-oriented org.)
  - “Good split between long-term decisive impact and near-term efficient impact.”
  - “I wanted a split between the major 3 pillars (Animal Welfare, GH&D, Longtermism/GCR) of EA. I’m generally more support of ‘big tent’/cause area buckets for donations rather than EV maxxing”
- Some referenced specific posts or recent changes, while others said they went with cached thoughts:
  - “Basically a nebulous combination of my assessment of each project (mostly formed before the election), as well as the fact that each has (in the lead-up to the election) vocally reported being funding-constrained.”
  - “I (somewhat) know all the organizations and went with my cached judgments of the cost-effectiveness of marginal donations to them.”
People also shared thoughts related to Giving Season:
- “...Would have LOVED more debates/ posts about ‘LTFF vs ALLFED?’ and ‘EA Funds Animal Welfare Fund vs. The Humane League?’” (This person also cited two posts.)
- “The whole giving season event is the reason I finished a [related text] that had been sitting in my drafts for a couple months. … I also found the marginal funding posts super interesting. It made me more excited about earning to give and helped me understand the perspective of nonprofits engaged in fundraising, particularly the posts from RP (Peter Wildeford and Abraham Rowe). Because it sounds like they would use funds for things that I consider promising, like moral weight research and cross-cause cost-effectiveness modeling, I allocated more votes toward them.”
- “Not sure how much that is because of the Donation Election or just the Forum in general, but it led quite naturally to me reading most of the related posts on the Forum. Due to this I’m now donating to Rethink Priorities this year & I was able to recommend impactful climate charities to non-EA friends who wanted to donate in that area.”
- “Loved this! Really pushed me to think about donation priorities through a compare/contrast and consideration of the marginal dollar way which I’ve always meant to work on more, but haven’t done so enough. I have a few ingrained priors I have formed overtime which initially formed my idea of what would be relatively highest and what wouldn’t be considered. I think that the major updates to my priors were from info on the EA Forum, especially recent grant info. For instance, Rethink Priorities got a big boon from this, while EA Infrastructure Funds got a downgrade (the name mislead me at first). As a side note, it would be cool if someone developed software for a version of this for private donations! (maybe this already exists?) Especially if it is as simple and easy to operate as this; excel sheets work (and are needed for more complicated analyses), but take effort to read. Only additional functions needed would be an ability to add more funds/charities and a way for it to be easily cross-posted to social media for further conversation.”
Finally, shoutout to the voter who added: “Thank you for listening to my TED talk. I am legally obligated to tell you this is not financia-, err, altruism advice” after their (decently long) comment.
What links here?
- Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023) by Lizka (Dec 24, 2023, 1:55 AM; 124 points)

Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)

LizkaDec 24, 2023, 1:55 AM

124 points

14 comments9 min readEA link

Lizka Dec 8, 2023, 3:24 PM
33 points
16 ∶ 1
in reply to: KnightSaladin’s comment on: EA thoughts from Israel-Hamas war
The moderation team is banning KnightSaladin for 2 months for violating Forum norms. (You can appeal here.)
KnightSaladin’s comments on the Forum have been aggressive (using rhetorical attacks), overconfident, and uncivil — generally not aimed towards collaborative truth-seeking. Examples of things that I want to heavily discourage from the Forum:
- The likeliest (to me) interpretation of the phrase, “your ilk would just want to commit a slow genocide while ignoring it,” is offensive and anti-semitic. A stretched interpretation is that this is a pretty aggressive way of referring to people who disagree with KnightSaladin (in which case it’s attacking a group of people for holding a point of view, which is not what I want to see on the Forum).
- Calling a post “a load of genocide supporting nonsense which shows how disgustingly biased this community is” is unnecessarily rude and offensive.
- “Please do some basic research” is unnecessarily rude.
- Overconfident statements include “during the Oct 7th raid we know Israel killed many of it’s own civilians and it was a highly planned out military operation.”
- Generally, seeing someone engage on the Forum exclusively on one topic isn’t promising to me, especially when that topic is a politicized/current-events issue and not one of the core EA topics (loosely, when it’s discussed more in the news than in EA contexts)
If KnightSaladin comes back to the Forum, we’ll expect to see a much higher quality of discourse, and engagement on more than one issue. I expect that we’ll ban KnightSaladin indefinitely if anything like the above continues.
As a reminder, bans affect the user, not the account.

Vote in the Donation Election by 15 December

LizkaDec 8, 2023, 2:11 PM

39 points

0 comments3 min readEA link

Lizka Dec 7, 2023, 12:18 PM
2 points
0 ∶ 0
on: Lizka’s Shortform
If you voted in the Donation Election, how long did it take you? (What did you spend the most time on?)
I’d be really grateful for quick notes. (You can also private message me if you prefer.)
What links here?
- Vote in the Donation Election by 15 December by Lizka (Dec 8, 2023, 2:11 PM; 39 points)

Lizka

A couple of questions /​ follow-up discussions

Some things that were highlights to me

My rough understanding of the basic setup of the main(?) model

2023: high­lights from the year, from the EA Newsletter

2023: news on AI safety, an­i­mal welfare, global health, and more

Open thread: Jan­uary—March 2024

Why people voted the way they did (& other highlights from the comments) - extended edition

Win­ners in the Fo­rum’s Dona­tion Elec­tion (2023)

Vote in the Dona­tion Elec­tion by 15 December

A couple of questions / follow-up discussions

2023: highlights from the year, from the EA Newsletter

2023: news on AI safety, animal welfare, global health, and more

Open thread: January—March 2024

Winners in the Forum’s Donation Election (2023)

Vote in the Donation Election by 15 December