I’m currently researching forecasting and epistemics as part of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute.
Ozzie Gooen
Karma: 8,312
Why “Changing the World” is a Horrible Phrase
Gratipay for Funding EAs
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
FAI Research Constraints and AGI Side Effects
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 first .impact Workathon
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!
Deep Dive with Matthew Gentzel on Recently Effective Altruism Policy Analytics
EA Assembly & Call for Speakers
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.
Is there a hedonistic utilitarian case for Cryonics? (Discuss)
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.
That is a fantastic video.