Is there a cost-effectiveness analysis available where I can read how you arrived at these numbers?
Cost per client served: $4.7
Cost per unintended pregnancies averted: $3.60
Cost per maternal death averted: $685
Cost per DALY: $1.63
Cost per CYP: $2.31
I donât find find this argument all too compelling. Who pays for the governmentâs ability to protect the wealthy? In absence of a government, why wouldnât the wealthy pay someone else to protect their wealth?
That said I completely agree with the last sentence and I think taxation is very reasonable. Deciding that taxation is theft and therefore always wrong, is after all the worst argument in the world.
I donât mean to argue for libertarianism, but I do want advocates of socialism to be mindful of how they plan to enforce it.
Good question, worth exploring!
One point not brought up, which I think is somewhat important to me is how socialist policies are to be enforced.
I personally dislike the implicit threat of violence enforcement of those policies requires. Iâll be the first to admit itâs difficult to create a functional society without the use or threat of force, but I still would like to see it treated it as a necessary evil not to be used lightly.
There are many laws which would be less popular if one added to the end: âor weâll beat you upâ, but in some sense every law has this implicitly written. Weâre just not very mindful of it!
I think itâs reasonable for vegans to ask someone whether they would still eat meat if they had to kill the animal themselves. In a similar manner, would you be fine with forcing someone into a car and locking them into a cell if they refused to hand over everything they had earned that month?
This is far from a knockdown argument and somewhat of a strawman, but it matters to me. I place value on people being free to live their lives how they see fit. Anyone should be welcome to form a socialist commune, but it should be out of ones own volition.
I think thereâs a lot of local maxima that are very juicy. I would encourage people to look at the opportunities around them that others would miss, and try my best to foster a culture that helps its members discover them.
A great example of someone doing this is Abdurrahman who took the initiative to create EA in Arabic which I expect will be really impactful. I donât expect there were many EA jobs available to him in Saudi, but he looked around and found a gap (no resources on EA in one of the worldâs biggest languages) and executed on the opportunity.
I am currently looking into an animal welfare intervention which South American EAâs would be much better suited to do than anyone else. Some time ago I looked into policy interventions to improve the water sanitation efforts of the Jal Jeevan Mission in India. An Indian EA from the right state would be much better suited to carry out the sanitation advocacy for JJM than I am.
Iâve yet to find a region of the world without opportunities, but most of them wonât be listed in a career guide!
Iâm grappling with this exact issue. I think AI is the most important technology humanity will event, but Iâm skeptical of the EV of much work on the technology. Still it seems that it should be the only reasonable thing to spend all my time thinking about, but even then Iâm not sure Iâd arrive at anything useful.
And the opportunity cost is saving hundreds of lives. I donât think there is any other question that has cost me as much sleep as this one.
forecasting newsletter by nuno sempere
Excerpt from the most recent update from the ALERT team:
Highly pathogenic avian influenza (HPAI) H5N1: What a week! The news, data, and analyses are coming in fast and furious.
Overall, ALERT team members feel that the risk of an H5N1 pandemic emerging over the coming decade is increasing. Team members estimate that the chance that the WHO will declare a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) within 1 year from now because of an H5N1 virus, in whole or in part, is 0.9% (range 0.5%-1.3%). The team sees the chance going up substantially over the next decade, with the 5-year chance at 13% (range 10%-15%) and the 10-year chance increasing to 25% (range 20%-30%).
their estimated 10 year risk is a lot higher than I would have anticipated.
write, write, write.
I suspect the primary reasons you want to break up Deepmind from Google is to:
Increase their autonomy, reducing pressure from google to race
Reduce Deepmindâs access to capital and compute, reducing their competitiveness
Perhaps that goes without saying, but I think itâs worth explicitly mentioning. In a world without AI risk, I donât believe you would be citing various consumer harms to argue for a break up.
The traditional argument for breaking up companies and preventing mergers is to reduce the companyâs market power, increasing consumer surplus. In this case, the implicit reason for breaking up Deepmind is to decrease its competitiveness thus reducing consumer surplus.
I think itâs perfectly fine to argue for this, I just really want us to be explicit about it.
Iâm awestruck, that is an incredible track record. Thanks for taking the time to write this out.
These are concepts and ideas I regularly use throughout my week and which have significantly shaped my thinking. A deep thanks to everyone who has contributed to FHI, your work certainly had an influence on me.
I think Iâm sympathetic to Oxfordâs decision.
By the end, the line between genuine scientific inquiry and activistic âresearchâ got quite blurry at FHI. I donât think papers such as: âProposal for a New UK National Institute for Biological Securityâ, belong in an academic institution, even if I agree with the conclusion.
One thing that stood out to me reading the comments on Reddit, was how much of the poor reception that could have been avoided with a little clearer communication.
For people such as MacAskill, who are deeply familiar with effective altruism, the question: âWhy would SBF pretend to be an Effective Altruist if he was just looking to do fraud?â is quite the conundrum. Of all the types of altruism, why specifically pick EA as the vehicle to smuggle your reputation? EA was already unlikeable and elitist before the scandal. Why not donate to puppies and Harvard like everyone else?
I actually admire MacAskill for asking that question. The easy out, would be to say: âhow could we have been so foolish, SBF was clearly never a real EAâ. But he instead grapples with the fact that SBF seems to have been genuinely motivated by effective altruism, and that these ideals must have played some part in SBFs decision to commit fraud.
But for any listener who is not as deeply familiar with the effective altruism movement, and doesnât know its reputation, the question comes off as hopelessly naive. The emphasis they hear is: âWhy would SBF, a fraudulent billionaire, pretend to be an Effective Altruist?â The answer to that is obviousâmalicious actors pretend to be altruistic all the time!
I see EA communication make this mistake all the time. A question or idea whose merit is obvious to you might not be obvious to everyone else if you donât spell out the assumptions it rests on.
I think I am misunderstanding the original question then?
I mean if you ask: âwhat you all think about the series as an entry point for talking about some of these EA issues with friends, family, colleagues, and studentsâ
then the reach is not the 10 million people watching the show, itâs the people you get a chance to speak to.
Wasnât the Future Fund quite explicitly about longtermist projects?
I mean if you worked for an animal foundation and were in a call about give directly, I can understand that somebody might say: âLook we are an animal fund, global poverty is outside our scopeâ.
Obviously saying âI donât care about povertyâ or something sufficiently close that your counterpart remembers it as that, is not ideal, especially not when youâre speaking to an ex-minister of the United Kingdom.
But before we get mad at those who ran the Future Fund, please consider thereâs much context we donât have. Why did this call get set up in the first place? I would expect them to be screening mechanisms in place to prevent this kind of mismatch. What Rory remembers might not have been what the Future Fund grant maker remembers and there might have been a mismatch between the very blunt âSF cultureâ the future fund operated by and what an ex-minister expects.
That said I have a very positive impression of Rory Stewart, and it saddens me to hear our community gave him this perception. Had I been in his shoes, Iâm not sure I would have thought any different.
Iâm working on an article about gene drives to eradicate malaria, and am looking for biology experts who can help me understand certain areas Iâm finding confusing and fact check claims I feel unsure about.
If you are a masters or grad student in biology and would be interested in helping, I would be incredibly grateful.
An example of a question Iâve been trying to answer today:
How likely is successful crossbreeding between subspecies of Anopheles Gambiae (such as anopheles gambiae s.s. and anopheles arabiensis), and how likely is successful crossbreeding between anopheles gambiae and other complexes?
If you know the answer to questions like these or would have an easy time finding it out, send me a dm! Happy to pay for your time.
a devastating argument, years of work wasted. Why oh why did I insist that the bookâs front cover had to be a snowman?
I think itâs a travesty that so many valuable analyses are never publicly shared, but due to unreasonable external expectations itâs currently hard for any single organization to become more transparent without occurring enormous costs.
If open phil actually were to start publishing their internal analyses behind each grant, I will bet you at good odds the the following scenario is going to play out on the EA Forum:
Somebody digs deep into a specific analysis carried out. It turns out Open Philâs analysis has several factual errors that any domain expert could have alerted them to, additionally they entirely failed to consider some important aspect which may change the conclusion.
Somebody in the comments accuses Open Phil of shoddy and irresponsible work. That they are making such large donations decisions based on work filled with errors, proves their irresponsibility. Moreover, why have they still not responded to the criticism?
A new meta-post argues that the EA movement needs reform, and uses the above as one of several examples showing the incompetence of âEA leadershipâ.
Several things would be true about the above hypothetical example:
Open Philâs analysis did, in fact, have errors.
It would have been better for Open Philâs work not to have those errors.
The errors were only found because they chose to make the analysis public.
The costs for Open Phil to reduce the error rate of analyses, would not be worth the benefits.
These mistakes were found, and at no cost (outside of reputation) to the organization.
Criticism shouldnât have to warrant a response if it takes time away from work which is more important. The internal analyses from open phil Iâve been privileged to see were pretty good. They were also made by humans, who make errors all the time.
In my ideal world, every one of these analyses would be open to the public. Like open-source programming people would be able to contribute to every analysis, fixing bugs, adding new insights, and updating old analyses as new evidence comes out.
But like an open-source programming project, there has to be an understanding that no repository is ever going to be bug-free or have every feature.
If open phil shared all their analyses and nobody was able to discover important omissions or errors, my main conclusion would be they are spending far too much time on each analysis.
Some EA organizations are held to impossibly high standards. Whenever somebody points this out, a common response is: âBut the EA community should be held to a higher standard!â. Iâm not so sure! The bar is where itâs at because it takes significant effort to higher it. EA organizations are subject to the same constraints the rest of the world is subject to.
More openness requires a lowering of expectations. We should strive for a culture that is high in criticism, but low in judgement.
Agree, I suspect most people downvoted it because they inferred it was a leading question.
I havenât seen the series, but am currently halfway through the second book.
I think it really depends on the person. The person I imagine would watch three-body problem, get hooked, and subsequently ponder about how it relates to the real world, seems like they also would get hooked by just getting sent a good lesswrong post?
But sure, if someone mentioned to me they watched and liked the series and they donât know about EA already, I think it could be a great way to start a conversation about EA and Longtermism.
https://ââforum.effectivealtruism.org/ââtopics/ââcorporate-animal-welfare-campaigns