I’m currently researching forecasting and epistemics as part of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute.
Ozzie Gooen
Karma: 8,314
I definitely would also encourage donors to add more to their profiles! Many are still quite minimal and could be improved.
On the other hand, I think that there’s not too much incentive right now with so few people donating. This is a good reason for others to donate more, specifically to ones with nice profiles (if they want to specifically encourage such a thing).
Not asking you Peter, just people reading this in general.
There are over 1k communities on Gratipay, many doing very arguably less directly important things. This isn’t just money for anyone, it’s supposed to be for projects done by people who haven’t set up official nonprofits (very few people have done this). It also does work for organizations, such as those online.
I agree with Bitton, and think he has more experience on this than almost any of the rest of us.
That said, great job with the effort and I’m looking forward to seeing where you go from here.
I really like this work. I was originally going to mention a lack of consideration of the time value of money, but when I started reading the linked-to paper I realized it was your starting point.
Have you thought much about how to use it for x-risk reduction work? I assume that x-risks may be quite different than the examples you specified, with near-infinite values of B.
Now that I know it, this seems pretty obvious to me, especially for risky research. I think that the bureaucracy of requiring insurance calculations and paperwork would outweigh the benefits of it in most areas of academic research, but there could definitely be some for which it is considered.
It may have become more difficult. At my company, I believe we interview a lot more people for data science than we do Engineering. We seem to have a lot more difficulty finding engineers. That said, this could in part be because our data science seems more interesting than our engineering.
Video Here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nkRiaa0Epz0
On that note, for Effective Altruist organizations, I imagine that ‘not being needed’ means ‘not continuing to be the best use of our resources’, or, ‘have faced significant diminishing marginal returns to additional work’. That said, the condition for an organization to rationally end is different than their success condition.
On obvious point: Most organizations/causes have multiple increasingly-large success conditions. There’s not one ‘success condition’, but a progressive set of improvements. We won’t ‘win’ as an abstract term. I mean, I don’t think Martin Luther King would say that he ‘won’, he accomplished a lot, but things got complicated at the end and there was still a lot to be done; needless to say though, he did quite well.
A better set of questions may be ‘what are some reasonable goals to aim for?’ Then, ‘how can we measure how far we are from those specific goals?’
In completely pragmatic matters, I think that the best goals for us is not legislation, but monetary donations to EA-related causes.
Goal 1: 100m/year
3: 1b/year
4: 10b/year
etc
The ultimate goal for all of us may be a positive-singularity, though that is separate from effective altruism itself and harder to measure. Also, of course the money above would have to be adjusted for quality of the EA org relative to the best.
There is of course, still the question of how good the interventions are and how good the intervention-deciding mechanisms are. However, I feel like measuring / estimating those are quite a bit more challenging and also present a very orthogonal and distinct challenge from raising money. For instance, growing a movement and convincing people in the large would be an ‘EA popularity goal’, which would be measured in money, while finding new research to understand effectiveness would be more of a ‘EA Research Goal’. Two very different things.
The current .workathon time is 12-4pm Pacific time Sunday, which is 6pm-10pm UTC. My guess is that this wouldn’t be the best time for you to work, but it would be pretty cool if it could cross with your event. We could probably move our event a bit earlier if it would make a difference.
If you decide not to do it at the same time, I would recommend still making a fb page for it and inviting people to come, in a similar manner. I definitely recommend keeping track of the event with a similar hackpad.
It would be really fantastic if we could have ongoing and routinely scheduled work sessions that are online, open to everyone, and in time schedules that could incorporate everyone.
The event completed. Both notes and videos are here: https://impact.hackpad.com/19-July-2015-Workathon-WbtP8esj942
If you have suggestions on how to improve it, please comment!
Really, a talk you think would be interesting to EAs. That definitely sounds like something that would be interesting. There aren’t too many explicitly EA projects out there; I think there’s a lot of interesting stuff more on the edges that should get more attention.
Please apply.
I’m totally ok with people agreeing to spend money on it, but not from their EA budget, and acknowledging that.
Agree it definitely has some long term advantages, curious how we can estimate those.
I find the argument “I’m so afraid of dying and believe in cyronics so much that signing up for cryonics would end many of my worries and let me be far more productive” kind of humorous, though imagine that it could be true for a very small set of people.
I think that there could be arguments made that sponsoring cryonics research could be useful outside of its implications to you personally. For instance, maybe if continuity of life is super important, then it could be worth paying for lots of other people to be signed up, or maybe its promotion would encourage people to think longer term.
Btw, would it be possible for you to also have facebook events? I never follow the ones on goodreads.
For the record, I dislike the down votes. I realize that some of this piece seems like an attack on existing effective altruists, but on the whole it seems reasonable to me.
More important, having negative votes is pretty harsh. I’ve had that before on LessWrong and it greatly discouraged me from posting more. I think that content like this is probably positive, and more should be encouraged.
I think we need to de-emphasize the notion of having a ‘big social impact’, as opposed to an ‘optimal individual social impact’. The word ‘big’ implies an objective measure of largeness, which seems absurd to me. If I were to compare my social impact to Bill Gates, I would consider myself to have a ‘tiny’ social impact, no matter what I do.
Basically, I don’t think that people should spend too much time comparing their social benefit to the absolute best people in the world, in part because that makes a very weak signal for individual optimization (If I do action A I would be doing 0.001% of Bill Gates’ work, if I do action B I would be doing 0.002%). The much more high-signal alternative is to understand what the a relatively good outcome for the decider is, and consider their actions compared to that.
I realize that the content of this post really isn’t about that specific point, but hear it brought up often, so would like to point that out.
I really wish people understood what optimal meant; that’s it’s a completely relative word (optimal given some constraints, which could in practice be quite limiting).
Maybe we could come up with a new word. I personally like ‘optimization’, but it could be with a qualifier.
My line for myself is to ‘do the best I can with the resources available to me’.
I personally like the phrase ‘do your best’ a lot. It’s unfortunate that typically people who say it seem to have low standards, and it’s become associated with that, but that’s exactly what we should be doing.
In this case, I imagine the title could have been something like, ‘how to optimize your social impact if you live in a poor country’, or just ‘the best ways to do good in a poor country’.
Good point. I’ve found that many people aren’t initially sure of what they would want to estimate. I’m going to write a post (or a few) on this, but now are some ideas:
How effective do you expect each EA intervention to be? What about strange new ideas? Givewell does pretty comprehensive estimates, but smaller ones would make sense for more speculative ideas.
Considering a large project? Estimate the lengths of the subcomponents, then see the worst (and best) 10% outcome for the time.
Making a decision between 2-4 things, where much of it is numeric (like money)? If you categorize those in Guesstimate, you can see the likelihood that any one is the best. It can become obvious when the value of additional information is 0; when it makes sense to stop modeling and thinking about it and simply make the decision.
Have a few different ways to model something? Try multiple models out and see which produces the most certainty. This is a really good indicator of which is the best (if you do this, I would recommend including a node for model uncertainty, which is the uncertainty of the rest of the model).
For animal causes, what’s your estimate on the amount of pain different animals suffer? Try multiplying this to find the expected impact of consuming different animal products. Then take that estimate and use it to find the benefit of interventions to get others not to consume those products.
That is a fantastic video.