MichaelA

• MichaelA 21 Oct 2020 6:54 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: Some his­tory top­ics it might be very valuable to investigate

  Thanks for shar­ing that, Aaron :)

  Pia also joined (and in­tro­duced them­selves in) the His­tory and Effec­tive Altru­ism Face­book group. Hope­fully some­one there or here can con­nect with her re­gard­ing the in­ter­sec­tion of EA and his­tor­i­cal re­search. And I can imag­ine a sem­i­nar/​event on that be­ing cool—I’d be keen to at­tend that as well if some­one sets it up!

• MichaelA 20 Oct 2020 14:09 UTC

  2 points

  on: An­no­tated List of Pro­ject Ideas & Vol­un­teer­ing Re­sources

  Thanks for com­piling this—things like this seem plau­si­bly re­ally valuable, and I’m glad to see in­creas­ing num­bers of this kind of thing! I’ve di­rected a few peo­ple to this post at var­i­ous times :)

  Just a heads up that I think the “An­no­tated List of EA Ca­reers Ad­vice” link is bro­ken, and the link should in­stead be this.

• MichaelA 18 Oct 2020 12:22 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Alexis Carlier’s comment on: Longter­mist rea­sons to work for in­no­va­tive governments

  Thanks for this post—this seems like an im­por­tant and un­der-dis­cussed idea!

  It’s not ob­vi­ous to me that sta­tus effects will be that im­por­tant. In­fluen­tial po­si­tions in any gov­ern­ment are pretty well-re­garded, and it could be eas­ier to climb the policy lad­der in in­no­va­tive gov­ern­ments (e.g. if they are smaller).

  I think that that should in­deed help in­crease the sta­tus that peo­ple can ex­pect from pur­su­ing this path, and thereby re­duce the ex­tent to which wor­ries about sta­tus will stop peo­ple go­ing into this path. But I’d guess that what Jia had in mind might’ve been pri­mar­ily about sta­tus within EA/​among EAs.

  In gen­eral, EAs might be bi­ased to­wards roles in ex­plic­itly EA or­gani­sa­tions partly be­cause that gives them more sta­tus among other EAs, be­cause it’s eas­ier for other EAs to un­der­stand whether and why those roles are im­por­tant. If you’re do­ing a re­ally im­por­tant role in some im­por­tant gov­ern­ment/​foun­da­tion/​com­pany, other EAs may just not know whether or why that role or org is im­por­tant. (See e.g. here and here for some similar ar­gu­ments.)

  And this is­sue may be more in­tense the less well known or in­fluen­tial-seem­ing the gov­ern­ment/​foun­da­tion/​com­pany is. So this might make EAs bi­ased to­wards work­ing at EA orgs rather than the US gov­ern­ment, and be­ing to­wards the lat­ter rather than a smaller and more in­no­va­tion gov­ern­ment.

  This definitely isn’t a rea­son why we shouldn’t high­light the value of this path, though—if any­thing, it would push in favour of say­ing more loudly and more of­ten how use­ful this path would be! (Con­di­tional on this path in­deed be­ing a good idea, which I’d cur­rently guess it is.) That way, we can in­crease how well EAs un­der­stand the value of this path, and thus al­low peo­ple pur­su­ing this path to get a more ap­pro­pri­ate level of sta­tus (rel­a­tive to e.g. peo­ple work­ing at EA orgs).

  (I’d prob­a­bly pre­fer it if peo­ple in gen­eral cared less about sta­tus. But I think a lot of peo­ple do care about sta­tus, my­self in­cluded, and it seems hard to make one­self care sub­stan­tially less. So it might some­times be best to just try to make sta­tus more al­igned with im­pact.)

• MichaelA 13 Oct 2020 17:10 UTC

  3 points

  on: Book on Civil­i­sa­tional Col­lapse?

  One book I’d recom­mend that hasn’t been men­tioned in the other an­swers is Toby Ord’s The Precipice. It fo­cuses on ex­is­ten­tial risk more broadly, rather than just on col­lapse, but sev­eral parts of the book are about civ­i­liza­tional col­lapse, or are quite use­ful for think­ing about that topic.

  I’ve also pre­vi­ously made “col­lec­tion of sources that seem very rele­vant to the topic of civ­i­liza­tional col­lapse and/​or re­cov­ery”. You (or oth­ers) might find that col­lec­tion helpful. It in­cludes books as well as other types of sources.

  I definitely think this is a very im­por­tant topic, and I’m glad to see EAs in­ter­ested in it!

• MichaelA 13 Oct 2020 17:07 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: MichaelA’s comment on: MichaelA’s Shortform

  See also the book recom­men­da­tions here.

• MichaelA 13 Oct 2020 10:13 UTC

  9 points

  on: What Helped the Voice­less? His­tor­i­cal Case Studies

  Hi Mauri­cio, thanks for post­ing this! I haven’t had a chance to read the post yet, but I definitely think it’s an im­por­tant topic (as I sup­pose you’re aware, see­ing as you linked to my post call­ing for re­search very much along these lines!).

  Out of in­ter­est, did that post of mine play a role in you choos­ing to in­ves­ti­gate this topic? Or would you have prob­a­bly done this any­way?

  Also, just wanted to men­tion that I’ve I shared a link to this post in the His­tory and Effec­tive Altru­ism Face­book group, as I imag­ined peo­ple there might find it in­ter­est­ing :)

• MichaelA 2 Oct 2020 16:21 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Emanuele_Ascani’s comment on: Pro­pose and vote on po­ten­tial tags

  I’d say “sci­en­tific re­search” is prob­a­bly cov­ered by Scien­tific Progress, Re­search Meth­ods, and tags about spe­cific ar­eas sci­en­tific re­search can be done in?

• MichaelA 2 Oct 2020 16:19 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Emanuele_Ascani’s comment on: Pro­pose and vote on po­ten­tial tags

  I think I’m in favour of a Cost-Effec­tive­ness Eval­u­a­tion tag. (Or maybe Cost-Effec­tive­ness Anal­y­sis? I think that’s the more com­mon term?)

  That seems similar to Im­pact Assess­ment (a tag I made last month), so some of my thoughts on that tag might also be rele­vant. But I think Cost-Effec­tive­ness Anal­y­sis is prob­a­bly differ­ent enough from ex­ist­ing tags to be worth hav­ing.

• MichaelA 1 Oct 2020 18:23 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: MathiasKirkBonde’s comment on: AMA: Markus An­der­ljung (PM at GovAI, FHI)

  In ad­di­tion to Markus’ sug­ges­tion that you could con­sider ap­ply­ing to the GovAI fel­low­ship, you could also con­sid­er­ing ap­ply­ing for a re­searcher role at GovAI. Dead­line is Oc­to­ber 19th.

  (I don’t mean to im­ply that the only way to do this is to be at FHI. I don’t be­lieve that that’s the case. I just wanted to men­tion that op­tion, since Markus had men­tioned a differ­ent po­si­tion but not that one.)

• MichaelA 30 Sep 2020 6:24 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes’s comment on: Cru­cial ques­tions for longtermists

  [Un­struc­tured, quickly writ­ten col­lec­tion of re­ac­tions]

  I agree that those two things would be valuable, largely for the rea­son you men­tion. Im­prov­ing our neu­roimag­ing ca­pa­bil­ities could also be use­ful for some in­ter­ven­tions to re­duce long-term risks from malev­olence.

  Though there could also be some down­sides to each of those things; e.g.., bet­ter neu­roimag­ing could per­haps be used for pur­poses that make to­tal­i­tar­i­anism or dystopias more likely/​worse in ex­pec­ta­tion. (See “Which tech­nolog­i­cal changes could in­crease or de­crease ex­is­ten­tial risks from to­tal­i­tar­i­anism and dystopia? By how much? What other effects would those poli­ti­cal changes have on the long-term fu­ture?”)

  ---

  I think the main rea­son I didn’t already in­clude a ques­tion di­rectly about con­scious­ness is what’s cap­tured here:

  This post can be seen as col­lect­ing ques­tions rele­vant to the “strat­egy” level.

  One could imag­ine a ver­sion of this post that “zooms out” to dis­cuss cru­cial ques­tions on the “val­ues” level, or ques­tions about cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion as a whole. This might in­volve more em­pha­sis on ques­tions about, for ex­am­ple, pop­u­la­tion ethics, the moral sta­tus of non­hu­man an­i­mals, and the effec­tive­ness of cur­rently available global health in­ter­ven­tions. But here we in­stead (a) mostly set ques­tions about moral­ity aside, and (b) take longter­mism as a start­ing as­sump­tion.

  Though I ac­knowl­edge that this di­vi­sion is some­what ar­bi­trary, and also that con­scious­ness is at least ar­guably/​largely/​some­what an em­piri­cal rather than “val­ues”/​”moral” mat­ter. (One rea­son I’m im­plic­itly putting it partly in the “moral” bucket is that we might be most in­ter­ested in some­thing like “con­scious­ness of a morally rele­vant sort”, such that our moral views in­fluence which fea­tures we’re in­ter­ested in in­ves­ti­gat­ing.)

  ---

  After read­ing your com­ment, I skimmed again through the list of ques­tions to see what of the things I already had were clos­est, and where those points might “fit”. Here are the ques­tions I saw that seemed re­lated (though they don’t di­rectly ad­dress our un­der­stand­ing of con­scious­ness):

  What is the pos­si­ble qual­ity of the hu­man-in­fluenced fu­ture?

  • How does the “difficulty” or “cost” of cre­at­ing plea­sure vs. pain com­pare?

  Can and will we ex­pand into space? In what ways, and to what ex­tent? What are the im­pli­ca­tions?

  • Will we pop­u­late colonies with (some) non­hu­man an­i­mals, e.g. through ter­raform­ing? [it’s the im­pli­ca­tions of ter­raform­ing that make this rele­vant]

  Can and will we cre­ate sen­tient digi­tal be­ings? To what ex­tent? What are the im­pli­ca­tions?

  • Would their ex­pe­riences mat­ter morally?

  • Will some be cre­ated ac­ci­den­tally?

  [...]

  • How close to the ap­pro­pri­ate size should we ex­pect in­fluen­tial agents’ moral cir­cles to be “by de­fault”?

• MichaelA 28 Sep 2020 19:23 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: CarolineJ’s comment on: Has any­one gone into the ‘High-Im­pact PA’ path?

  In­ter­est­ing com­ment, thanks!

  Tanya at FHI first took the po­si­tion of ex­ec­u­tive as­sis­tant to Nick Bostrom. She ex­plained in the 80,000 Hours pod­cast how very, very valuable this has been for Nick Bostrom’s re­search—and af­ter that, for FHI op­er­a­tions.

  For peo­ple who don’t know the lat­est chap­ter of that story: Tanya is now the Direc­tor of Strat­egy and Oper­a­tions at FHI.

• MichaelA 28 Sep 2020 7:30 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: mike_mclaren’s comment on: Cru­cial ques­tions for longtermists

  Yeah, that sounds right. Those fac­tors were left out just be­cause I didn’t think of in­clud­ing them (be­cause I don’t know very much about these frame­works from pop­u­la­tion and con­ser­va­tion biol­ogy), rather than be­cause I ex­plic­itly de­cided to in­clude them, and I’d guess you’re right that at­tend­ing to those fac­tors and us­ing those frame­works would be use­ful. So thanks for high­light­ing this :)

  There are prob­a­bly also var­i­ous other “cru­cial ques­tions” peo­ple could high­light, as well as ques­tions that would fit un­der these ques­tions and get more into the fine-grained de­tails, and I’d en­courage peo­ple to com­ment here, com­ment in the google doc, or cre­ate their own doc­u­ments to high­light those things. (I say this partly be­cause this post has a very broad scope, so a vast ar­ray of fields will have rele­vant knowl­edge, and I of course have very limited knowl­edge of most of those fields.)

• MichaelA 24 Sep 2020 7:24 UTC

  2 points

  on: Database of ex­is­ten­tial risk estimates

  There’s cur­rently an ac­tive thread on LessWrong for mak­ing fore­casts of ex­is­ten­tial risk across the time pe­riod from now to 2120. Ac­tivity on that thread is already look­ing in­ter­est­ing, and I’m hop­ing more peo­ple add their fore­casts, their rea­son­ing, and ques­tions/​com­ments to probe and im­prove other peo­ple’s rea­son­ing.

  I plan to later some­how add to this database those fore­casts, an ag­gre­gate of them, and/​or links.

• MichaelA 24 Sep 2020 6:34 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Ardenlk’s comment on: How have you be­come more (or less) en­gaged with EA in the last year?

  (Btw, I’ve just up­dated my origi­nal an­swer, as it over­looked the time spent on au­dio­books, pod­casts, and video.)

• MichaelA 23 Sep 2020 16:03 UTC

  10 points

  on: Fore­cast­ing Thread: Ex­is­ten­tial Risk

  (Just want to men­tion that I’m guess­ing it’s best if peo­ple cen­tral­ise their fore­casts and com­ments on the LW thread, and just use this link post as a poin­ter to that. Though Amanda can of course say if she dis­agrees :) )

  The one thing I will say here, just in case any­one sees my ex­am­ple fore­cast here but doesn’t fol­low the link, is that I’d give very lit­tle weight to both my fore­cast and my rea­son­ing. Rea­sons for that in­clude that:

  • I’m not an ex­pe­rienced forecaster

  • I don’t have deep knowl­edge on rele­vant speci­fics (e.g., AI paradigms, state-of-the-art in biotech)

  • I didn’t spend a huge amount of time on my fore­cast, and used pretty quick-and-dirty methods

  • I drew on ex­ist­ing fore­casts to some ex­tent (in par­tic­u­lar, the LessWrong Elicit AI timelines thread and Ord’s x-risk es­ti­mates). So if you up­dated on those fore­casts and then also up­dated on my fore­cast as if it was in­de­pen­dent of them, you’d be dou­ble-count­ing some views and evidence

  So I’m mostly just very ex­cited to see other peo­ple’s fore­casts, and even more ex­cited to see how they rea­son about and break down the ques­tion!

• MichaelA 23 Sep 2020 15:01 UTC

  18 points

  in reply to: Ardenlk’s comment on: How have you be­come more (or less) en­gaged with EA in the last year?

  tl;dr: Du­ra­tion: Maybe ~12 months. Hours of EA-re­lated video per week dur­ing that time: Maybe 4? Hours of EA-re­lated au­dio­books and pod­casts per week: Maybe 10-15. Hours of all other EA-re­lated learn­ing per week: Maybe ~5-15?

  So maybe ~1400 hours to­tal. (What!? That sounds like a lot!) Or 520 hours if we don’t count video and au­dio, since those didn’t ac­tu­ally take time out of my day (see be­low).

  Duration

  I learned about EA around Septem­ber 2018, and started ac­tively try­ing to “get up to speed” around Oc­to­ber 2018. It’s less clear what “end points” to use—i.e., when was I now “up to speed”?

  Two pos­si­ble “end points” are when I wrote my first proper fo­rum post and when I was offered an EA re­searcher job. Both of those things hap­pened around the end of De­cem­ber 2019, sug­gest­ing this was a ~14 months pro­cess.

  But maybe a bet­ter “end point” would be around Au­gust 2019. By around then, I was run­ning an EA-based club at my school and or­ganis­ing and pre­sent­ing at lo­cal EA events. And in Septem­ber, I at­tended EAGxAus­tralia, and felt—to my sur­prise! - like I was un­usu­ally fa­mil­iar with EA ideas, among the peo­ple there. So that sug­gests this was a ~10 month pro­cess.

  Hours of video per week

  I watched EAG, EAGx, and other EA-re­lated videos only while on an ex­er­cise bike or while eat­ing. So it didn’t re­ally cut into my sched­ule, ex­cept in that it meant I wasn’t watch­ing other things at that time (e.g., ran­dom his­tory lec­tures, Net­flix). I’d guess this amounted to roughly 4 hours per week.

  Hours of au­dio per week

  I listen to au­dio­book and pod­casts while com­mut­ing, do­ing house­work, donat­ing plasma, or do­ing other tasks that don’t re­quire much fo­cus but also don’t al­low me to be on my lap­top. This seems to amount to roughly 1-2.5 hours per day. As with the video, this doesn’t re­ally cut into my sched­ule ex­cept by dis­plac­ing other au­dio things (and also by mak­ing me ex­tra helpful with house­work when I’ve got a re­ally good book/​pod­cast!).

  (I also listen at 1.5-2x speed, but skip back of­ten, so the 1-2.5 clock hours are prob­a­bly ~1.5-3.5 con­tent hours.)

  Hours per week ig­nor­ing video and audio

  Dur­ing these 10-14 months, I was also teach­ing at 0.8 FTE and do­ing a Masters of Teach­ing (but with a lower course-load than I ex­pect most Masters have, as it was in­te­grated with my ac­tual teach­ing). This was part of the Teach For Aus­tralia pro­gram, which peo­ple tend to find very busy and in­tense by it­self. So I crammed my “EA study” into week­ends, af­ter-work hours, and (teacher) holi­days, alongside the (limited and pretty easy) Masters course­work.

  So it wasn’t a huge num­ber of hours per week, sim­ply as I had few available. On the other hand, I think I’m happy with work­ing—and tend to work—more hours than is av­er­age. And I also just found learn­ing EA-rele­vant things very in­ter­est­ing, so that didn’t drain me at all—it was more like the car­rot I dan­gled in front of my­self to get my­self to do my other, ac­tual work more effi­ciently!

  And the mat­ter of hours per week is fur­ther com­pli­cated by the fact that (a) teach­ers get long holi­days, but (b) I had a lot of Masters work and teacher prep work to do dur­ing holi­days.

  So I’d pretty un­con­fi­dently guess I spent 5-15 hours per week on this, av­er­ag­ing out across that whole pe­riod (in­clud­ing both the work weeks and holi­day weeks).

  [My origi­nal an­swer ig­nored the video and au­dio time, since I’d been try­ing to re­mem­ber how much time I al­lo­cated to EA-re­lated stuff, and the video and au­dio didn’t re­ally re­quire al­lo­cat­ing spe­cial time so I over­looked it.]

• MichaelA 23 Sep 2020 8:34 UTC

  6 points

  on: MichaelA’s Shortform

  Here I list all the EA-rele­vant books I’ve read (well, mainly listened to as au­dio­books) since learn­ing about EA, in roughly de­scend­ing or­der of how use­ful I per­ceive/​re­mem­ber them be­ing to me. I share this in case oth­ers might find it use­ful, as a sup­ple­ment to other book recom­men­da­tion lists. (I found Rob Wiblin, Nick Beck­stead, and Luke Muehlhauser’s lists very use­ful.)

  That said, this isn’t ex­actly a recom­men­da­tion list, be­cause some of fac­tors mak­ing these books more/​less use­ful to me won’t gen­er­al­ise to most other peo­ple, and be­cause I’m in­clud­ing all rele­vant books I’ve read (not just the top picks).

  Google Doc ver­sion here. Let me know if you want more info on why I found some­thing use­ful or not so use­ful, where you can find the book, etc.

  See also this list of EA-re­lated pod­casts and this list of sources of EA-re­lated videos.

  1. The Precipice

     • Su­per­in­tel­li­gence may have in­fluenced me more, but that’s just due to the fact that I read it very soon af­ter get­ting into EA, whereas I read The Precipice af­ter already learn­ing a lot. I’d now recom­mend The Precipice first.

  2. Superforecasting

  3. How to Mea­sure Anything

  4. Ra­tion­al­ity: From AI to Zombies

     • I.e., “the se­quences”

  5. Superintelligence

     • Maybe this would’ve been a lit­tle fur­ther down the list if I’d already read The Precipice.

  6. Ex­pert Poli­ti­cal Judgement

     • I read this af­ter Su­perfore­cast­ing and still found it very use­ful.

  7. Nor­ma­tive Uncertainty

     • This is MacAskill’s the­sis, rather than a book

     • I’d now in­stead recom­mend the book by him and oth­ers on the same topic

  8. Se­cret of Our Suc­cess by Henrich

  9. Hu­man-Compatible

  10. The Book of Why

  11. Blueprint

      • This is use­ful pri­mar­ily in re­la­tion to some spe­cific re­search I’m do­ing, rather than more gener­i­cally.

  12. Mo­ral Tribes

  13. Al­gorithms to Live By

  14. The Bet­ter An­gels of Our Nature

  15. Think­ing, Fast and Slow

      • This might be the most use­ful of all these books for peo­ple who have lit­tle prior fa­mil­iar­ity with the ideas, but I hap­pened to already know a de­cent por­tion of what was cov­ered.

  16. Against the Grain

      • I read this af­ter Sapi­ens and thought the con­tent would over­lap a lot, but ac­tu­ally it pro­vided a lot of in­de­pen­dent value, I thought.

  17. Sapiens

  18. Destined for War

  19. The Dic­ta­tor’s Handbook

  20. Age of Ambition

  21. Mo­ral Mazes

  22. The Myth of the Ra­tional Voter

  23. The Hun­gry Brain

      • If I re­call cor­rectly, I found this sur­pris­ingly use­ful for pur­poses un­re­lated to the top­ics of weight, hunger, etc.; e.g., it gave me a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of the lik­ing-want­ing dis­tinc­tion.

  24. The Quest: En­ergy, Se­cu­rity, and the Re­mak­ing of the Modern World

  25. Harry Pot­ter and the Meth­ods of Rationality

      • Fiction

      • I also just found this very en­joy­able (I was some­what amused and em­bar­rassed by how en­joy­able and thought-pro­vok­ing I found this, to be hon­est)

      • This over­laps in many ways with Ra­tion­al­ity: AI to Zom­bies, so it would be more valuable to some­one who hadn’t already read those se­quences (but then I’d recom­mend such a per­son read most of those se­quences)

      • Within the 2 hours be­fore I go to sleep, I try not to stim­u­late my brain too much; e.g. I’d avoid listen­ing to most of the books on this list dur­ing that time. But I found that I could listen to this dur­ing that time with­out it keep­ing my brain too ac­tive. This is a perk, as that pe­riod of my day is less crowded with other things to do.

        • Same goes for Steve Jobs, Power Bro­ker, An­i­mal Farm, and Con­sider the Lob­ster.

  26. Steve Jobs by Walter Isaacson

      • Sur­pris­ingly use­ful, given I don’t plan to at all em­u­late Jobs’ life and don’t work in rele­vant in­dus­tries.

  27. En­light­en­ment Now

  28. The Un­der­cover Economist Strikes Back

  29. Inad­e­quate Equilibria

      • Halfway be­tween a book and a se­ries of posts

  30. Rad­i­cal Markets

  31. Com­mand and Control

  32. How to Be a Dic­ta­tor: The Cult of Per­son­al­ity in the Twen­tieth Century

  33. Cli­mate Mat­ters: Ethics in a Warm­ing World by John Broome

  34. The Power Broker

      • Very in­ter­est­ing, but very long and prob­a­bly not su­per use­ful.

  35. Science in the Twen­tieth Century

  36. An­i­mal Farm

      • Fiction

  37. Con­sider the Lobster

      • To be hon­est, I’m not sure why Wiblin recom­mended this. But I benefit­ted from many of his other

  (Hat tip to Aaron Gertler for sort-of prompt­ing me to post this list.)

  What links here?

  • How have you be­come more (or less) en­gaged with EA in the last year? by Aaron Gertler (8 Sep 2020 18:28 UTC; 48 points)

• MichaelA 23 Sep 2020 7:26 UTC

  19 points

  in reply to: Aaron Gertler’s comment on: How have you be­come more (or less) en­gaged with EA in the last year?

  Those are good ques­tions. I can’t re­mem­ber in great de­tail what I did (and es­pe­cially the or­der and causal at­tri­bu­tions). But here’s my rough guess as to what I did, which is prob­a­bly similar to what I’d recom­mend to oth­ers who are will­ing/​keen to in­vest a bunch of time to “get up to speed” quite thor­oughly:

  • I started mainly with the 80k ca­reer guide (now the “old ca­reer guide”), prob­lem pro­files, ca­reer pro­files, and other 80k ar­ti­cles I found via links (in­clud­ing their older blog posts)

    • I’d now recom­mend the Key Ideas ar­ti­cle rather than the ca­reer guide

  • I listened to ev­ery epi­sode of the 80k podcast

  • I started go­ing through the se­quences (Ra­tion­al­ity: AI to Zom­bies) on LessWrong, mainly via the “un­offi­cial” pod­cast version

    • But I only finished this around Fe­bru­ary this year, af­ter get­ting a job at an EA re­search org, so the lat­ter parts prob­a­bly weren’t key to my journey

    • But I’d still definitely recom­mend read­ing at least a sub­stan­tial chunk of the sequences

  • I watched on YouTube ba­si­cally all the EA Global talks since 2016, as well as a bunch of other EA-re­lated videos (see here for where to find such videos)

  • I started listen­ing to some au­dio­books recom­mended by Wiblin, Beck­stead, and/​or Muehlhauser

    • I se­lected these based on how rele­vant they seemed to me, how highly the peo­ple recom­mended them, and how many of those 3 peo­ple recom­mended the same book

    • I’ve now listened to/​read 30-38 (de­pend­ing on what you count) EA-rele­vant books since learn­ing about EA, most of which were recom­mended by one of those peo­ple. I should prob­a­bly share my list in a short­form com­ment soon.

      • ETA: I’ve now made that short­form com­ment, putting the books in roughly de­scend­ing or­der of per­ceived/​re­mem­bered use­ful­ness-to0me.

  • I read a lot of EA Fo­rum and LessWrong posts

    • I think I ba­si­cally book­marked or read any­thing that seemed rele­vant and that I was linked to from el­se­where or heard men­tioned, and then grad­u­ally worked through those book­marks and (sep­a­rately) the list of most up­voted posts based on what seemed most rele­vant or interesting

  • I looked at most ma­jor EA orgs’ sites and read at least some stuff there, I guess to “get a lay of the land”

    • E.g., FHI, Cen­ter on Long-Term Risk (then FRI), GPI, Char­ity En­trepreneur­ship, An­i­mal Char­ity Eval­u­a­tors …

  • I started listen­ing to some other pod­casts I’d heard recom­mended, such as Slate Star Codex, EconTalk, and Ra­tion­ally Speaking

    • I found the first of those most use­ful, and Ra­tion­ally Speak­ing not su­per use­ful/​in­ter­est­ing, personally

    • See also this list of podcasts

  • I sub­scribed to the main EA Newsletter

    • I now also sub­scribe to the EA Lon­don newslet­ter, and find it useful

  • I read ev­ery­thing on Conceptually

  • I read some stuff on the EA Con­cepts site

  • I ap­plied for lots of jobs, and through the pro­cess learned more about what jobs are available and what they in­volve (e.g., by do­ing work tests)

  • Prob­a­bly other things I’m forgetting

  I think this pro­cess would now be eas­ier, for a few rea­sons. One that stands out is that the tag­ging sys­tem makes it eas­ier to find posts rele­vant to a par­tic­u­lar topic. Another is that a bunch of peo­ple have made more col­lec­tions and sum­maries of var­i­ous sorts than there pre­vi­ously were (in­deed, I made an effort to con­tribute to that so that oth­ers could get up to speed more effi­ciently and effec­tively than I did; see also).

  So I’d prob­a­bly recom­mend peo­ple who want to repli­cate some­thing like what I did use the EA Fo­rum more cen­trally than I did, both by:

  1. read­ing good posts on the fo­rum (which are now more nu­mer­ous and much eas­ier to find)

  2. find­ing on the fo­rum cu­rated lists of links to the large body of other sources that are scat­tered around elsewhere

  (I ex­pect more se­quences on the EA Fo­rum will also help with this.)

• MichaelA 22 Sep 2020 13:46 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: MarkusAnderljung’s comment on: AMA: Markus An­der­ljung (PM at GovAI, FHI)

  I found this an­swer very in­ter­est­ing—thanks!

  On feed­back, I also liked and would recom­mend these two re­cent posts:

  • Ask­ing for advice

  • Giv­ing and re­ceiv­ing feedback

• MichaelA 22 Sep 2020 12:21 UTC

  6 points

  on: Is any­one co­or­di­nat­ing am­a­teurs to do cause pri­ori­ti­za­tion re­search in groups?

  I’m not aware of any­one do­ing pre­cisely this. But here are a cou­ple quick poin­t­ers to po­ten­tially rele­vant things:

  • ALLFED co­or­di­nate vol­un­teers to do re­search, and I be­lieve some/​many of these vol­un­teers are “am­a­teurs”, and I’d guess that some of this re­search oc­curs in groups and could be called “cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion” (though I’m not cer­tain)

    • There’s some info on their vol­un­teer pro­gram here

    • I’d guess ALLFED would be happy to talk to peo­ple about what they’ve learned from this

  • There’s a group called READI co­or­di­nat­ing a mix of am­a­teur and pro­fes­sional re­searchers to do EA re­search, though not nec­es­sar­ily pre­cisely “cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion re­search”

    • Here’s their site

    • One of the co­or­di­na­tors is Peter Slat­tery, and I ex­pect he’d be happy to talk to peo­ple about their work

  • I think Edo Arad has been in­volved in some rele­vant efforts

    • See their com­ments here

  • The var­i­ous EA re­search co­or­di­na­tion efforts re­lated to COVID might provide use­ful ev­i­dence on how suc­cess­ful this sort of thing is in gen­eral, and how best to do it

    • This wouldn’t be about cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion, but some les­sons might generalise

  • I think some­one is plan­ning to or already pro­vid­ing coun­try-spe­cific EA ca­reer ad­vice in France, similar to what Brian Tan de­scribes for the Philippines

    • If peo­ple want to hear more, I can mes­sage the per­son who I think was plan­ning/​do­ing this and see if they’re happy to give some pub­lic up­date or get in touch