Please do share that data when you get a chance. You guys have a lot of fascinating data in those survey results, and while I understand you have limited time/resources, it would be a shame to see them go untapped.
Nekoinentr
Karma: 96
Maybe your college EA idealistic self expectation’s were never that likely, so you shouldn’t beat yourself up about them.
It’s no big deal, but your formatting is a little different from the normal forum formatting—it might be worth requesting .impact provide a button to clear extraneous formatting via the issues link at http://effective-altruism.com/ea/vm/ea_forum_faq/
For example, suppose you see an idea for an effective charity on Charity Science. You contact them and they provide you with advice and link you up with potential cofounders.
Have they done this for anyone?
Surely if someone gave you a few hundred dollars to sustain a staff member such as yourself to spend a few man days leveraging volunteer tech & design effort, you’d do it? So less a matter of prioritizing things and more a matter of the EA Community Fund covering low hanging fruit like this so you don’t have to take time you presumably don’t have laboriously convincing someone that this is worth those few hundred dollars.
For more speculative things, we want to put part of the money towards a project that a friend we know through the Effective Altruism movement is starting. In general I think this is a good way for people to get funding for early stage projects, presenting their case to people who know them and have a good sense of how to evaluate their plans.
Agreed. Thanks for the work you do supporting things that’d otherwise not happen!
The Foundational Research Institute site in the links above seems to have a wealth of writing about the far future!
On premise 1, a related but stronger claim is that humans tend to shape the universe to their values much more strongly than do blind natural forces. This allows for a simpler but weaker argument than yours: it follows that, should humans survive, the universe is likely to be better (according to those values) than it otherwise would be.
IMO, the philosophers who accept this understanding are the so-called “type-A physicalists” in Chalmers’s taxonomy.
I’m not wholly sure I understand the connection between this and denying that consciousness is a natural kind. The best I can do (and perhaps you or thebestwecan can do better? ;-) ) is:
“If consciousness is a natural kind, then the existence of that natural kind is a separate fact from the existence of such-and-such a physical brain state (and vica versa)”
I presume CEA tech staff will make the branding changes, but is the plan for them also to make the longer term changes, or would that continue to be the .impact community? I don’t understand what roles CEA has taken on as of this announcement and what role .impact continues to have? It sounds from the first paragraph like .impact has decided to transition primary responsibility for forum maintenance and improvements to CEA, but the third last paragraph suggest otherwise—could someone from that community comment?
One reason this is that, because there are donors with money on the sidelines, if the organisations were able to find someone with a good level of fit, they could fundraise enough money to pay for their salaries.
Can you (very roughly) quantify to what extent this is the case for EA organisations? (I imagine they will vary as to how donor-rich vs. potential-hire-rich they are, so some idea of the spread would be helpful.)
but understanding that consciousness is a contested concept rather than a natural kind is itself a significant leap forward in the debate. (Most philosophers haven’t gotten that far.)
Who do and do not agree with that, then? You and thebestwecan clearly do. Do you know the opinions of prominent philosophers in the field? For instance David Chalmers, who sounds like he is amongst these(?)
The idea of a natural kind is helpful. The fact that people mean different things by “consciousness” seems unsurprising, as that’s the case for any complex word that people have strong motives to apply (in this case because consciousness sounds valuable). It also tells us little about the moral questions we’re considering here. Do you guys agree or am I missing something?
I don’t think I understand what you mean by consciousness being objective. When you mention “what processes, materials, etc. we subjectively choose to use as the criteria for consciousness”, this sounds to me as if you’re talking about people having different definitions of consciousness, especially if the criteria are meant as definitive rather than indicative. However presumably in many cases whether the criteria are present will be an objective question.
When you talk about whether “consciousness is an actual property of the world”, do you mean whether it’s part of ontologic base reality?
I wouldn’t have thought that hits-based giving should be a general strategy, as it’s one highly specific way of having an impact. I can understand 80,000 hours developing it as a way to understand their own impact; it fits when you’re giving in-depth advice to a few individuals on their whole careers, but that’s an atypical case.
What luck have the big EA charities (GiveWell and CEA come to mind as the obvious candidates) had with building up a non-EA donor base? (By which I mean one which wouldn’t otherwise donate to what’d generally be considered EA picks, like GiveWell recommendations, meta charities, etc.)
Not sure if this is the proper place to post.
I think it’d be a good place to post; it’s an open thread!
103:1 is an incredible fundraising ratio—how are you able to convince people to donate so much with such a small investment, apparently just a small amount of staff time, and how would others go about replicating this? If people could replicate your methods around the world it’d be highly desirable for them to do so.
Good.
If you feel you’ve become much less EA, I wonder what many others who were very into it must feel. From the outside you seem extremely involved - .impact/Rethink Charity do a huge amount with limited resources, and it seems like you do substantial volunteering with them, which doesn’t seem like putting little of yourself into EA. Thanks for what you do.