Hi!
Currently (Oct 2022) mostly doing translations and community building in Italy, and some web development consulting part-time.
I’m also a forum mod, which, shamelessly stealing from Edo, “mostly means that I care about this forum and about you! So let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”
Please have a very low bar for reaching out!
Used to be a Software Developer donating most of my income, and won the 2022 donor lottery, happy to chat about that as well
See also: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34563300
I am skeptical about this particular EtG idea: I don’t see why this market would be particularly inefficient or otherwise especially interesting. https://soundraw.io/ does seem pretty cool though
Thanks for the reply!
On 1. (asking for someone to repeat makes you look dumber/smarter) I would be interested to bet on this, but I worry that replies to a poll would be biased in my favour (as you said, system 2 and system 1 could disagree). It might also depend a lot on details and context, but if you are also interested we can try to operationalize a bet!
On 2. (SNR) it was meant to be a tongue in cheek self-deprecating joke about using too much jargon, sorry it didn’t come across that way! (I was thinking of Signal-to-Noise-Ratio , basically a way to repeat what I previously wrote with random jargon). I agree this point doesn’t apply much to parties and crowded social settings.
On 5. (Recording conversations) agree, depends a lot on context.
On the trivial inconveniences, I am conflicted. I guess I defer to others with more experience in the community.
In general I would be curious to hear tips for non-native speakers from native speakers. Sometimes I feel that the language situation is as uncomfortable for one group as it is for the other, and I wonder what we could do to make it better.
As an anecdote, my previous employer had an external independent counselor/support-person/coach/therapist/something that you could go to if for any reason you didn’t want to go to the company ones. (I don’t remember if they had paid for like 20 hours total, or if there was a cap of one meeting per person). I never looked into it, but I think the idea was that the external person would then report things anonymously or in aggregate, or not report anything and just offer support.
I’m not sure if it would be net-positive for EA (or even doable at all), but as a hypothetical, I think it would make me feel safer about confidentiality if I was talking to someone that was not employed by EA, close friends and colleagues with many senior EAs and grantmakers and so on.
Here are some things that anecdotally helped me as a non-native speaker in EA (although I consider myself relatively fluent), followed by some of my thoughts for native speakers (after the numbered list).
1. You mention:
I often just nod as if I understand what is being said because I fear that by asking “Can you repeat that, please?” I will be perceived as stupid and slow in a community that values time, effectiveness, high-value actions, and reason. I understand that this is mainly my own issue, and I am working on improving my language skills, but I think that something might be done on the other side too.
I strongly feel (90%) that asking for clarifications/explanations usually makes someone look smarter and more interested, and we don’t do this enough. It seems to me that people consider it a strong signal that you’re actually listening, interested in what the other person is talking about, and you’re actually trying to understand what they’re saying. Also, at EAGx sometimes even proficient English speakers didn’t know what a word meant (examples: MC/”master of ceremonies” and “marquee”, apparently they’re British words), asking for clarifications on those gives useful feedback to speakers on what terms are more common.
Anecdote: the only such case where I think people might have thought less of me was when I asked what a ToC was, and after that asked what a Theory of Change was, in a course where the material that week was about Theories of Change, and I hadn’t read any of it. Ooof. I still think that I counterfactually looked less stupid by asking, since I was more able to follow the discussion.
I know this doesn’t help much (“be less shy” is not great advice) but I think in EA asking for clarifications usually makes you look smarter, at least counterfactually.
2. Try to have talks in quiet places, I’m still surprised by how much easier it is for me to hold a conversation in English in a quiet place compared to a crowded place. I feel barely any difference in Italian. I think spending 5 minutes moving to a quieter table, a quieter room, or outside is worth it for me. Even for a 30-minute conversation. (To “abuse IT jargon every two sentences to express easy concepts”: I find the SNR counterintuitively important when speaking in English)
3. Focus even more than you normally would on the person you’re speaking with (I think this is good advice in general). I found that making a conscious effort to ensure that my interlocutor has 110% of my attention helped immensely. (Related, I expect all usual conversation tips to be even more useful in a second language).
4. Alcohol makes both speaking and understanding much harder. The effect for me is like 10x higher in English than in Italian.
5. (Maybe) if a conversation is especially important, consider asking if you can record it. I found that at EAG people were surprisingly open to this (as long as I promised not to share), but I don’t know if it’s because they would have been uncomfortable saying no.
As a minor point, I want to push back a tiny bit on asking native speakers to do things for us.
I’m a bit afraid it would add a trivial inconvenience for native speakers to talk to non-native speakers, and increase instead of reduce the EA English-native “bias”. (Which I agree can be a thing, as another non-native speaker told me once: “native speakers just take up more space”).
As an anecdote: one of the most valuable conversations I had (if not the most valuable) was with a very popular/senior EA at EAG, who had just had an absurd amount of 1-1s that day and was visibly pretty tired. I’m afraid that if they also had to think “Lorenzo is not a native speaker, I’ll need to pay attention to that”, they would maybe have scheduled their last 1-1 of the day with a native speaker instead :/. I’m afraid that in day-to-day interactions it could make an even larger difference.
In general, I, very personally, would not want most people to apply the post recommendations when talking to me, unless after 5-10 minutes the conversation feels limited by the language barrier.
Some tips I would personally prefer are:
- the one from Kirsten: “repeat the exact same words in the same order”. I sometimes get confused when I ask someone to repeat something, and they say something different. I spend the next 30 seconds trying both to deduce what was the original thing they said in the first place and to follow the conversation at the same time.
- “fake an American accent” heard it from someone at EAGx, if you have a very British accent it might be worth trying for fun.
- If you can’t understand something I said, please tell me, and don’t feel bad. I know my accent is pretty bad, it’s my fault, not yours.
On:
Be aware and try to control the voice inside of your head (which I am highly confident is there even if you don’t want to admit it[2]) that says “ugh, this person who clearly isn’t understanding me seems slow and stupid. I don’t want to waste my time with them”
Embarrassingly, I’m also guilty of something related to this.
On one occasion I think I greatly overestimated how strongly English fluency would correlate with achieving results, and overestimated the counterfactual impact of helping someone with a project because I thought their English was worse than mine.
On a separate occasion, I greatly underestimated the impact of a different opportunity because I thought being a non-native speaker would limit any contribution I could make.
So in general I now consciously try to update less on English fluency when making predictions.
Smart! I think loom is also free (for now) if you don’t use it to host videos, and I personally find it more convenient (I use the browser extension, I like that you can easily select a rectangle to record)
kg is kilograms, t is tonnes, but what is u and what is M?
They are SI Prefixes: M stands for mega or 1 million, 10^6.
u (for μ) stands for micro or 1 millionth, 10 ^ −6.
Is the conclusion that catching wild fish does more damage to the ecosystem than throwing plastic into the ocean
If I understand correctly, the conclusion is that the direct effects of marine plastic pollution on seabirds / marine mammals are probably much smaller than the effects of fishing on fish.
Cross-posting a similar thread from LessWrong
For more information on them, I really like their Giving What We Can page and a recent interview
A catastrophic collapse of FTX would move the bitcoin price down, so maybe shorting bitcoin would have been a good idea to safeguard some $ assets against the collapse of FTX. I’m not sure this is a good idea, and I don’t think this option was available to EA charities as all of the above issues with hedging apply even more so in this case.
Interestingly, just before this post got published BTC price moved back almost exactly to pre-FTX collapse levels.
I think it strengthens the overall thesis that hedging would have been impractical.
Thank you for editing the comment and really thank you for the feedback.
I agree, we will need to be very careful about striking a proper balance here, but I think we can find something that’s better than the status quo (which results in downvotes and off-topic discussions, and detracts from discussions on how to do the most good)
I agree that the current norms are probably not clear enough to cover this situation, we are thinking about adding more specific ones.
As a non-american, I also initially found the lack of use-mention distinction to be very counterintuitive. But it’s culturally very important for a very large fraction of forum readers, so I would also ask you to edit your initial comment. If you don’t do that, we may just edit the comment for you.
Using “n-word” would definitely not count as “misleading or manipulating”. If you wanted to be absolutely precise I would recommend linking to the original source.
I agree with most of this comment, but
I think financial markets not responding until Feb 20th was a clear case of markets doing substantially worse than the people around me.
As someone that knows nothing about finance, I don’t understand this point.
If you had bought S&P500 on Feb 20th 2020 you would be up 20% today, so the market not reacting does not seem that irrational in hindsight? Also, US GDP didn’t seem to change that much in 2020 and 2021?
I guess VIX options might have been underpriced, but I think you would need to time them pretty precisely around march?
I know some people in the community made a bunch of money, but in periods of high volatility I expect many people to make some money and many people to lose some money (for example when the market immediately recovered while still in the middle of a pandemic).
https://discord.gg/gBEJvahKRz seems to work for me
You might be interested in Impact Certificates, Markets for Altruism and https://www.super-linear.org/
Does Open Philanthropy solicit donations from the public?
I recommend people install Ublock Origin.
It blocks a lot of spammy/scammy websites, including the one that 8000hours redirects me to.
Not a power user, but definitely wasted too much time on manifold. https://manifold.markets/Lorenzo?tab=portfolio
I just look into the market creator’s profile and their position, and try to guesstimate counterparty risk. Most people with non-troll usernames/profile pictures seem to be very trustworthy, got surprised only twice. User portfolio size or number of markets was not a strong predictor. Also, it depends a lot on the details of the market, definitely not a fixed 10-20% risk. The base rate would be closer to 1-2% but it’s just a base rate.
That said, I would have lost points in the FTX market you mentioned and would not have bet in the 80k one, because the distinction between capabilities and safety doesn’t seem clear.
See also Triple counting impact in EA (and comments) on the problem of “double counting”.
I do think there’s much more to be said on this topic though, and it probably depends on things like your model of the distribution of impact and various counterfactuals. Shapley values: Better than counterfactuals could also be a useful way to think about these things (in some specific cases, I personally don’t think they’re usually better).
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