Oscar Sykes

• Oscar Sykes 6 Nov 2024 18:30 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Ex­pec­ta­tions Scale with Scale – We Should Be More Scope-Sen­si­tive in Our Funding

  In theory, organizations with ~2x the budget should produce about ~2x the output. There are, of course, reasons in practice to believe that output does not scale quite so linearly with increases in resources. However, these reasons crucially fall on both sides of our possible expectations, suggesting a linear increase in outputs is a reasonable base expectation.

  I’d phrase this section a little differently. I think as a prior you should assume that charities become less cost-effective as they scale. However, the organisations that do grow should be the ones with above-average cost-effectiveness for their size. So even if a charity is less cost-effective than when it was smaller, if funders properly consider size, an average large charity should be equally cost-effective to an average small charity.

Os­car Sykes’s Quick takes

• Oscar Sykes 14 Oct 2024 13:34 UTC

  14 points

  2 ∶ 0

  on: Why Stop AI is bar­ri­cad­ing OpenAI

  AI experts have said in polls that building AGI carries a 14-30% chance of causing human extinction!

  My colleague took the median number of 14% from the latest AI Impacts survey

  FWIW I believe the median value from the linked survey is 5%. The only relevant place where 14% shows up is that it is the mean probability researchers place on high-level machine intelligence being extremely bad for humanity. The median probability for the same answer is 5% and the median answer to the more specific question “What probability do you put on future AI advances causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” is also 5%

• Oscar Sykes 7 Oct 2024 16:37 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 1

  on: Dis­cus­sion thread: An­i­mal Welfare vs. Global Health De­bate Week

  No clue, tough question

• Oscar Sykes 8 Aug 2024 20:56 UTC

  13 points

  4 ∶ 0

  on: Four Ran­dom­ized Con­trol Tri­als In Economics

  They all convincingly answer questions that have been the focus of debate in empirical economics for decades.

  I would not say this is true of the medical debt RCT. I think it tells us very little about situations where people have more normal types of debt and actually expect to repay it

  I like Eliezer’s tweet on this

  

• Oscar Sykes 7 Jul 2024 21:29 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: My cir­cuitous, undi­rected path to an EA job

  Thanks for writing this. I found it really moving and admire your perseverance throughout the process

• Oscar Sykes 21 Dec 2023 19:09 UTC

  23 points

  9 ∶ 8

  on: Re­think Pri­ori­ties needs your sup­port. Here’s what we’d do with it.

  My impression is both that Rethink pays pretty decent salaries and that you guys find hiring additional researchers quite easy. Have you guys considered lowering your salaries? I know there are practical considerations that make this hard to do in the short-term but you could, say, offer lower salaries to new staff and give existing staff lower pay rises which would lower your staff costs over the medium term

• Oscar Sykes 9 Sep 2023 4:06 UTC

  1 point

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Joel Tan🔸’s comment on: Po­tas­sium Chlo­ride as a Cause Area?

  Thanks so much, this is super informative.

  Do you know if the price premium for potassium chloride is due to some fundamental thing? Or is it just because it is a smaller market and could have the potential to significantly decline in price if it became more popular?

[Question] Po­tas­sium Chlo­ride as a Cause Area?