I do independent research on EA topics. I write about whatever seems important, tractable, and interesting (to me). Lately, I mainly write about EA investing strategy, but my attention span is too short to pick just one topic.
I have a website: https://mdickens.me/ Most of the content on my website gets cross-posted to the EA Forum.
My favorite things that I’ve written: https://mdickens.me/favorite-posts/
I used to work as a software developer at Affirm.
I liked your box that gave concrete advice on how to improve policy suggestions. A lot of people spend a lot of time and energy focusing on what doesn’t work, and it’s nice to see some focus on what does work.
Have you put any thought in how to overcome the sorts of political obstacles that cause politicians to favor certain interest groups at the expense of a greater good (such as some agricultural subsidies)?
[W]e found it easier than expected to gain access to policymakers, and thus when we have more politically feasible responses to problems and more support for them, we think it will be possible for us to take these to policymakers.
That’s great news! I had previously assumed that political action in this area would be infeasible, but I’m happy to be wrong on this one.
For Amazon Smile, you can get browser addons that automatically redirect amazon.com to smile.amazon.com.
Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amazonsmileredirector/
Exactly. It reminds me of Cheerfully in that Schindler does exactly what Cheerfully says you shouldn’t do. I think the trait worth imitating here isn’t the guilt, but the deep sense of caring and desire to do everything possible.
Hi everyone! I’m a student at Stanford studying math and computer science. I got into utilitarianism a few years ago, and started thinking about how to apply utilitarian philosophy to life. This led me to the effective altruist community.
I currently plan on doing earning to give, either by programming, working in finance, or starting a startup. I typically donate to ACE-recommended charities—helping non-human animals is a hugely neglected area and I think that’s where we can have the biggest impact.
But let’s assume that giving was really just a giant fight for status… would that be so bad?
If there were a social norm of giving to the most effective charities to achieve high status, this sounds like the concept of pretending to really try, i.e. pretending to try in a way that’s more or less indistinguishable from actually trying. This is probably a good thing.
Encourage the creation of other EA startups. We think there is some low hanging fruit in this space. (post on this forthcoming)
I’d be very interested to hear about this. As far as I know, MealSquares is the most successful startup by EAs at this point. A lot of people talk about it (including me) but most people don’t do it (including me), so it’s great to see some EAs putting their career where their mouth is.
To give a concrete example: I’ve just finished my first year of a PhD program. And I’ve spent a good proportion of that first year agonising with myself over the question: “What should my thesis topic be?”. Every time someone suggested a topic or I thought about narrowing down on an area a little voice in my head would go “But what if that’s not the best thing for you to research? What if this other thing was better?”
This sounds like the classic exploration/exploitation tradeoff, which occurs any time you’re trying to optimize a system. Maybe we should apply some of the research in this area to our lives as EAs. (Although I’m not sure how practical that would be.)
I don’t think you have to know the best way to use resources to make the better place. All you have to do is want to know it, try to figure it out, and act on your best guess.
I think the lack of EA work on bad policy comes largely from the heavy competition in the area. To an extent, improving policy is zero-sum in that there are lots of people who are actively working against any particular policy (some good policies receive minimal opposition, but there probably aren’t many of these). Whereas if you, say, donate money to AMF, few people will try to stop you. Even those who disagree with your decision won’t actually prevent you from giving the money and won’t prevent AMF from distributing the bednets.
I’m surprised in some sense that there hasn’t been more discussion about religion (moreso Eastern religions) in EA, and spreading/working with those religions as an EA cause.
I’m not surprised by that at all. Most EAs are non-religious or at least weakly religious, and spreading religion is a non-intuitive idea for non-religious people. Even for religious people, it doesn’t make much sense to spread other religions.
So far every comment I’ve seen has been insightful and thoughtful. I would like to see the karma requirement lowered soon to make it easier to get new users.
Feature request: The ability to tag people in posts like on Twitter and Facebook (e.g. @RyanCarey).
Feature request: Separate sections for serious in-depth writings and incomplete thoughts or discussion prompts, perhaps like LW’s Main/Discussion. Ideally I’d like to see something with an even lower standard of contribution than LW’s Discussion, similar to Felicifia. Suppose for example that I have a question related to EA. This doesn’t seem right for a top-level post, but it could get lost in an open thread.
I think the problem with that is the platform here is much better than FB. I think it would be better to have both “main” and “discussion” on this site.
One possible side benefit is that it can include the (few) people who don’t have FB. I know at least one person who does not have FB, wants to use the EA group but doesn’t want to get addicted to FB.
For threads like that it might also be helpful to have “sort by new” as the default option. Right now I don’t believe there is an option to change default sorting on a per-thread basis.
Last May, my local THINK chapter raised $5000 to give to The Humane League, of which I contributed $500. I’m currently a student and saving most of my money, so it’s not much, but it’s my biggest donation ever and I’m proud of it. I was also the first to propose that we give to The Humane League, so I can take some of the credit for the money going there instead of somewhere less effective.
Silk advertises itself as “50% more calcium than dairy milk”, so I’d say yes. Most brands of soymilk I’ve seen have at least as much calcium as dairy milk. But I don’t know if your body absorbs it as readily from soymilk as from dairy milk.
This is likely true if you’re mostly sedentary, but if you work out (especially if you’re building muscle) then you probably need to pay attention to your protein intake.
Anecdotal evidence: Before I started tracking my protein intake, I was getting around 50-100g of protein a day. To build muscle, someone my weight needs more like 120g.
Sorry for the late response! IIRC, five members each donated $500 and one member offered to match everyone else’s donation.
We received a $2000 matching from Giving 2.0, so we effectively moved $7000 to The Humane League.
Awesome job on becoming vegetarian! Sometimes the hardest part can be the lack of social acceptance. Maybe find some veg friends or join a vegetarian club/group? It can be helpful to surround yourself with people who have similar goals.
Do you have any idea how we might go about fixing the situation? It seems to me like math/econ/tech people in their 20s (including me) don’t know what it takes to make other demographics feel welcome. The best thing I can think of is encourage some people from other demographics to write about and actively discuss EA, and to spread the writings of people who already do.
A lot of the comments on here are just pingbacks. Could we possibly filter those out so we can only see actual user comments?