Ozzie Gooen

• Ozzie Gooen 15 Aug 2019 20:16 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: algekalipso's comment on: Log­a­r­ith­mic Scales of Plea­sure and Pain: Rat­ing, Rank­ing, and Com­par­ing Peak Ex­pe­riences Suggest the Ex­is­tence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering

  Re­lated; I think peo­ple do di­rectly make choices that hint at this. Ex­am­ples would in­clude spend­ing large num­bers of re­sources on drugs and sex on the pos­i­tive side, and (I’d ex­pect) large num­bers of re­sources to avoid tor­ture /​ short-du­ra­tion-but-painful situ­a­tions.

  Listen­ing to the Feel­ing Good pod­cast, one com­mon thing is that many peo­ple in Amer­ica have deep fears of be­com­ing home­less, and work very hard to avoid that spe­cific out­come. Much of this is ir­ra­tional, but some quite jus­tified.

• Ozzie Gooen 15 Aug 2019 14:27 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: remmelt's comment on: What new EA pro­ject or org would you like to see cre­ated in the next 3 years?

  That’s quite a re­ply, thanks!

  That does con­vince me both that it could be use­ful and more im­por­tantly, that you speci­fi­cally have ex­per­tise and in­ter­est for work that you do on it to be use­ful to oth­ers.

  That said, I would point out that it seems like a “nice small win”, but I would be more ex­cited about it be­ing part of a port­fo­lio of similar wins or similar.

  It does cover cover “op­er­a­tions sup­port” and “coach­ing/​ad­vice”, but a very spe­cific parts of them.

  Ku­dos for work­ing on this though and helping out those other orgs. I’m ex­cited to see where things go as they con­tinue.

• Ozzie Gooen 7 Aug 2019 23:19 UTC

  5 points

  in reply to: algekalipso's comment on: Cluster Headache Fre­quency Fol­lows a Long-Tail Distribution

  Thanks!

  Some quick thoughts:

  1. One quick way to get peo­ple to not take you se­ri­ously is with a bad cost effec­tive­ness es­ti­mate. There’s a much big­ger risk of do­ing a sloppy/​over­con­fi­dent job than benefit of hav­ing a high num­ber at the end of it (in EA cir­cles). Also, there is a rep­u­ta­tion of these es­ti­mates to both pro­duce amaz­ing num­bers and also be very wrong, so while I sup­port at­tempts, I’d also recom­mend lots of clar­ifi­ca­tion, hedg­ing, and con­sid­er­a­tion of ways the num­ber could be poor. I think the de­fault ex­pec­ta­tion is for the num­ber to not be great; but even if the me­dian isn’t good, it’s pos­si­ble upon fur­ther in­ves­ti­ga­tion it could be bet­ter than ex­pected, which could be quite worth­while.

  2. “to reach all chronic suffer­ers” → I’d recom­mend tar­get­ing 30%-60% of suffer­ers. The last sev­eral per­cent would be much more ex­pen­sive.

  3. I’m quite skep­ti­cal of the click → cure stats in par­tic­u­lar. For-profit web­sites of­ten have a 1% rate of peo­ple who go from click → pur­chase, and this could be a pretty sig­nifi­cant amount of work to pur­chase.

  4. Is this equa­tion tak­ing into ac­count that the “cure” could last for many years? Would the re­sult be in “QALYs per year”?

  5. I’m sure you’ve an­swered this el­se­where, but why the Amer­i­can fo­cus? Would it be pos­si­ble in In­dia or similar?

  6. This es­ti­ma­tion seems like some­thing that Char­ity En­trepreneur­ship would have a lot more ex­pe­rience in. The pro­gram seems quite similar to some of their oth­ers.

  7. I’d sug­gest read­ing up on the mini-fi­asco of the leaflet­ting re­search, if you haven’t yet. Just make sure not to make some of the mis­takes made around that. Some con­text: https://​​an­i­malchar­i­tye­val­u­a­tors.org/​​blog/​​ace-high­light-up­dated-leaflet­ing-in­ter­ven­tion-re­port/​​ https://​​ace­sounder­glass.com/​​2015/​​04/​​24/​​leaflets-are-in­effec­tive-tell-your-friends/​​ https://​​medium.com/​​@har­ri­son­nathan/​​the-prob­lems-with-an­i­mal-char­ity-eval­u­a­tors-in-brief-cd56b8cb5908

  8. Con­sider us­ing Guessti­mate for clar­ity, but I’m bi­ased :)

  9. Ku­dos for the efforts, and good luck!

• Ozzie Gooen 4 Aug 2019 22:05 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert's comment on: What types of or­ga­ni­za­tions would be ideal to be dis­tribut­ing fund­ing for EA? (Fel­low­ships, Or­ga­ni­za­tions, etc)

  Yep, good point. I think the fact that EA Funds (and pos­si­bly other pro­grams) fund a bunch of other in­di­vi­d­u­als in­di­cates that there could more room for more fel­low­ship-like pro­grams.

  I’d hope that EA Funds and similar could always act as “es­cape valves” for ar­eas over­looked by spe­cific pro­grams. I’m definitely not sug­gest­ing that these pro­grams re­place EA Funds, but rather that they be pro­vided as well.

[Question] What types of or­ga­ni­za­tions would be ideal to be dis­tribut­ing fund­ing for EA? (Fel­low­ships, Or­ga­ni­za­tions, etc)

• Ozzie Gooen 4 Aug 2019 20:10 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen's comment on: Cluster Headache Fre­quency Fol­lows a Long-Tail Distribution

  One quick thought: it could be neat ex­per­i­ment to make $2k of Face­book ads to tar­get peo­ple with these is­sues, point­ing to a spe­cific web­page the dis­cusses how these peo­ple could get treat­ment. That said, I of course re­al­ize some may not be le­gal, so it could be tricky.

• Ozzie Gooen 4 Aug 2019 20:08 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: algekalipso's comment on: Cluster Headache Fre­quency Fol­lows a Long-Tail Distribution

  For what it’s worth, this seems like a pretty big deal to me if it were true. Is there any quick QALY es­ti­mate or similar for how much things can be im­proved if ev­ery­one had quick ac­cess to DMT or similar?

Con­ver­sa­tion on fore­cast­ing with Vaniver and Ozzie Gooen

• Ozzie Gooen 27 Jul 2019 12:21 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for June 2019

  Makes sense. I’m ex­cited for the com­ment prize.

  I think that the main “or­ga­ni­za­tion” posts I’m think­ing of are al­most like a differ­ent class, like they are us­ing the EA Fo­rum as an aca­demic jour­nal as op­posed to as a blog. There could be some self-se­lec­tion then; like a sep­a­rate cat­e­gory /​ web­site where peo­ple self-se­lect for a differ­ent kind of feed­back. I’m go­ing to be chat­ting to peo­ple about this.

• Ozzie Gooen 27 Jul 2019 1:46 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen's comment on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for June 2019

  [com­ment deleted]

• Ozzie Gooen 26 Jul 2019 22:25 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for June 2019

  A ques­tion for the prize win­ners (if they read this and have time):

  Did you find this award helps to mo­ti­vate you, and do you have thoughts on if the prize should be changed in the fu­ture?

• Ozzie Gooen 26 Jul 2019 22:23 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Habryka's comment on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for June 2019

  Yep, I’d gen­er­ally agree with that. One pos­si­ble dis­tinc­tion is that I could see value in rec­og­niz­ing posts that have high EV but don’t nec­es­sar­ily match “in­tel­lec­tual progress” in one way or an­other.

  My com­ment ap­plied to the fact that all three win­ners were tough to com­pete with for most peo­ple. How­ever, there is the similar point that the In­for­ma­tion Se­cu­rity Ca­reers post in par­tic­u­lar is odd be­cause it was use­ful be­cause it of the rep­u­ta­tion of the writ­ers (I’d agree this seemed nec­es­sary.)

• Ozzie Gooen 26 Jul 2019 17:18 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Edit­ing available for EA Fo­rum drafts

  That makes me re­ally happy. I re­ally would like to see more ex­per­i­men­ta­tion and use of del­e­ga­tion of del­e­gate-able tasks around EA, ku­dos for set­ting that up.

• Ozzie Gooen 26 Jul 2019 8:47 UTC

  38 points

  on: EA Fo­rum Prize: Win­ners for June 2019

  (To be clear, I don’t mean this as a com­plaint, but an emer­gent ob­ser­va­tion that calls for pos­si­ble changes)

  I think these win­ners were quite rea­son­able. That said, I find it a bit awk­ward that these posts are even com­pet­ing the more com­mon blog posts. I could imag­ine this be­ing pretty frus­trat­ing for al­most any­one not in ei­ther an EA org or get­ting paid by an EA group to spend a sig­nifi­cant amount of time work­ing on a piece. If these win­ners were all valid en­tries, then I have lit­tle hope for al­most any “ca­sual” en­try to have a chance here.

  On a re­lated note, if the norm is to rate the “top se­ri­ous EA or­ga­ni­za­tion doc­u­ments,” this seems quite difficult to do for differ­ent rea­sons. For one, “In­for­ma­tion se­cu­rity ca­reers for GCR re­duc­tion” seems like a very differ­ent class of thing to me than “In­ver­te­brate Sen­tience”. Se­cond, if we keep on do­ing this, I’d imag­ine we’d even­tu­ally want some do­main ex­perts; or at least, a some­what differ­ent rank­ing/​setup than for the many small posts.

  I feel like it would be pretty fair to ei­ther ex­clude ma­jor EA orgs from this com­pe­ti­tion in the fu­ture, or have a sep­a­rate tier, like the “best emerg­ing artist” award (but for writ­ing.)

  Just a thought for fu­ture prizes.

• Ozzie Gooen 24 Jul 2019 12:26 UTC

  20 points

  on: Re­think Grants: an eval­u­a­tion of Dona­tional’s Cor­po­rate Am­bas­sador Program

  I think one cool thing this piece does is use a pretty wide range of ap­proaches to es­ti­mat­ing the value of this pro­gram. As such, I’d be par­tic­u­larly cu­ri­ous to get feed­back from oth­ers here on what parts peo­ple find re­li­able or ques­tion­able.

  [Dis­claimer: I sub­mit­ted com­ments to this post ear­lier]

• Ozzie Gooen 24 Jul 2019 12:20 UTC

  6 points

  on: Edit­ing available for EA Fo­rum drafts

  This seems like a re­ally good idea to me, happy to hear you are do­ing this!

  I think that if many peo­ple have similar is­sues, it could be use­ful to find an as­sis­tant from UpWork or similar to help you. There are some peo­ple who are rea­son­ably in­ex­pen­sive and could provide use­ful writ­ing feed­back (though not EA-spe­cific feed­back). I per­son­ally would be hes­i­tant to use much of your time, but am more will­ing if much were out­sourced (and likely happy to pay the rele­vant amount.)

• Ozzie Gooen 22 Jul 2019 10:37 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer's comment on: Defin­ing Effec­tive Altruism

  Thanks for the spread­sheet by the way. How have those groups been go­ing? It seems like an in­ter­est­ing pro­ject.

• Ozzie Gooen 22 Jul 2019 10:35 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer's comment on: Defin­ing Effec­tive Altruism

  So, I wouldn’t recom­mend more EAs just make an un­crit­i­cal try of do­ing so again, if for no other rea­son than it strikes me as a waste of time and effort.

  I could imag­ine that mak­ing a spin-off could be pretty sim­ple. It could take a lot of time and effort to keep all the parts in­te­grated. While this may not have been worth it yet, if there were a time that oth­ers in the fu­ture would es­ti­mate the costs as be­ing high to keep­ing things uniform, spin-offs seem pretty rea­son­able to me.

  The heuris­tic I use to think about this is to leave the man­age­ment with the re­la­tion­ship be­tween the EA com­mu­nity and “Group X”, is to let mem­bers of the EA com­mu­nity who are part of Group X man­age EA’s re­la­tion­ship with Group X.

  I in gen­eral agree, though I could imag­ine many situ­a­tions where peo­ple from CEA or similar may want to be in­volved some­what to make sure things don’t go wrong.

  In this case, I’d as­sume that William MacAskill is in a re­ally good po­si­tion to ap­peal to much of academia. I didn’t mean “ab­solutely all” of academia be­fore, sorry if that wasn’t clear.

• Ozzie Gooen 21 Jul 2019 23:35 UTC

  2 points

  on: Defin­ing Effec­tive Altruism

  I’ve been think­ing more that we may want to split up “Effec­tive Altru­ism” into a few differ­ent ar­eas. The main EA com­mu­nity should have an easy enough time re­al­iz­ing what is rele­vant, but this could help or­ga­nize things for other com­mu­ni­ties.

  As men­tioned in this piece, the com­mu­nity’s take on EA may be differ­ent from what we may want for aca­demics. In that case one op­tion would be to dis­till the main aca­demic-friendly parts of EA into a new term in or­der to in­ter­face with the aca­demic world.

• Ozzie Gooen 21 Jul 2019 23:31 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: Liam_Donovan's comment on: Defin­ing Effec­tive Altruism

  My quick take onto why this was down­voted would be be­cause some­one may have glanced at it quickly and as­sumed you were be­ing nega­tive to MIRI or EA.

  I think around be­ing “Science-al­igned”, the post means us­ing the prin­ci­pals and learn­ings of the sci­en­tific method and similar tools, rather than agree­ing with “the ma­jor­ity of sci­en­tists” or similar.

  The main­stream sci­en­tific com­mu­nity seems also likely to be skep­ti­cal of EA, but that doesn’t mean that EA would have to there­fore be similarly skep­ti­cal of it­self.

  That said, of course whether one fol­lows the sci­en­tific method and similar for some prac­tices, es­pe­cially in cases where they aren’t backed by many other com­mu­ni­ties, could be rather up for de­bate.