Thanks for writing this up, I just looked back at the results of a generic blood test measuring many different things I did earlier in the year and I had a creatinine value of 0.82 (the reference range was given as 0.7-1.3).
I haven’t looked through the literature you cited, do you happen to know if I am already in the healthy range whether it is still helpful to be supplementing, or if it is bad to go over 1.3 if I do supplement?
OscarD🔸
Karma: 1,441
I agree that 5 (accepting OP-dominated balance sheets) seems like the best solution.
I think a different but related point is that an org that can fundraise outside of EA is that much more valuable than an org producing identical outputs but fundraising from within EA. The big example of this of course is GiveWell—using EA principles but getting money from a far wider set of people. Raising $1 from OP (and even more so other EA sources) has pretty direct opportunity costs for other high-impact projects, but raising $1 from someone else mainly trades off against that donor’s consumption or their other donations which we (putatively) think are a lot less impactful.
EA Australia and LTFF. Reflections at https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​7FufeFhDE7Fp9i3fr/​​five-years-of-donating
Five years of donating
I found this a really clear and useful explanation (though I already had a decent idea how NAO worked)!
If ever you want to reach a broader audience, I think making an animated video based on this content, maybe with the help of Rational Animations or Kurtzgesagt, would work well.
Assuming a key inefficiency of the nasal swabs method is the labour costs of people collecting them, is the process straightforward enough that you could just set up an unmanned sample collection place where in a busy building somewhere people can just swab themselves and drop the sample in a chute or box or something? Hopefully post-Covid people are fairly familiar with nasal swabbing technique.
Thanks for sharing the raw data!
Interestingly, of the 44 people who ranked every charity, the candidates with most last-placed votes were: PauseAI = 10, VidaPlena = ARMoR = 5, Whylome = 4, SWP = AMF = Arthropoda = 3, … . This is mostly just noise I’m guessing, except perhaps that it is some evidence PauseAI is unusually polarising and a surprisingly large minority of people think it is especially bad (net negative, perhaps).
Also here is the distribution of how many candidates people ranked:
I am a bit surprised there were so many people who voted for none of the winning charities—I would have thought most people would have some preference between the top few candidates, and that if their favourite charity wasn’t going to win they would prefer to still choose between the main contenders. Maybe people just voted once initially and then didn’t update it based on which candidates had a chance of winning.
I think the main reason to update one’s vote based on the results is if you voted number 1 for a charity that is first or second, but a charity you also quite like is e.g. fourth or fifth, then strategically switching to rank the latter first would make sense. But this was not the case for me.
Overall my guess is the live vote tallies adds to the excitement but doesn’t actually contribute much epistemically?
yeah sure, lmk what you find out!
I think I am quite sympathetic to A, and to the things Owen wrote in the other branch, especially about operationalizing imprecise credences. But this is sufficiently interesting and important-seeming that I am noting to read later some of the references you give to justify A being false.
Surely we should have nonzero credence, and maybe even >10% that there aren’t any crucial considerations we are missing that are on the scale of ‘consider nonhumans’ or ‘consider future generations’. In which case we can bracket worlds where there is a crucial consideration we are missing as too hard, and base our decision on the worlds where we have the most crucial considerations already, and base our analysis on that. Which could still move us slightly away from pure agnosticism?
Your view seems to imply the futility of altruistic endeavour? Which of course doesn’t mean it is incorrect, just seems like an important implication.
I also didn’t find it too compelling, I think partly it is the issue of the choice seeming not important or high-stakes enough. Maybe the philanthropist should be deciding whether to fund clean energy R&D or vaccines R&D, or similar.
I don’t think I quite agreed with this, or at least it felt misleading:
And you cannot reasonably believe these chaotic changes will be even roughly the same no matter whether the beneficiaries of the donation are dog or cat shelters.
I think it may be very reasonable to think that in expectation the longterm effects will be ‘roughly the same’. This feels more like a simple cluelessness case than complex cluelessness (unless you explain why the cats vs dogs will predictably change economic growth, world values, population size etc).
Whereas the vaccines vs clean energy I think there would be more plausible reasons why one or the other will systematically have different consequences. (Maybe a TB vaccine will save more lives, increasing population and economic growth (including making climate change slightly worse), whereas the clean energy will increase growth slightly, make climate change slightly less bad, and therefore increase population a bit as well, but with a longer lag time.)
Also on your question 1, I think being agnostic about which one is better is quite different to being agnostic about whether something is good at all (in expectation) and I think the first is a significantly easier thing to argue for than the second.
Thanks for writing this up, and congrats on having preliminary promising signs!
I left a bunch of more minor comments in the CEA sheet (thanks for making that public).
Are there any interest groups on the other side of this issue? I suppose budget hawks and fiscal conservatives may try to shoot down any new funding plan, particularly given EU budgetary woes. But otherwise, it seems like a good issue in terms of not making powerful enemies (since the Pharma industry is onside).
In the field where you can leave a comment after voting it says the comment will be copied here but not who you voted for, probably some people just missed that info though.
How come LTFF isn’t in the donation election? Maybe it is too late to be added now though.
How does LTFF relate to https://​​www.airiskfund.com/​​about?
I am confused given the big overlap in people and scope.
Why do you think tactical voting is good/​should be allowed? (I haven’t thought about it much myself, I just have a vague sense that it often seen as bad.)
I agree these sound like great (though of course high-risk) opportunities, but find myself confused: why are such things not already being funded?
My understanding is that Good Ventures is moving away from some such areas. But what about e.g. the EA Animal Welfare Fund or other EA funders? I don’t know much about animal welfare funding, so on face value I am pretty convinced these seem worth funding, but I am worried I am missing something if more sensible/​knowledgeable people aren’t already funding them. (Though deferring too much to other funders could create too much group-think.)
Could you spell out why you think this information would be super valuable? I assume something like you would worry about Jaan’s COIs and think his philanthropy would be worse/​less trustworthy?
Good on you all!
Does anyone know whether CE/​AIM has looked into this, and if not it seems like they should? Great that you guys have already started something so now maybe there is no need to go via their incubation program, but conversely they might still have a significant value add in terms of networks + advice + funding. I’m not sure who the relevant CE person to ask would be.