You’ve probably considered it, but it’s not on your list: To hedge against any change in our consumption of meat, you could invest in in vitro meat, and other meat-alikes.
Peter McIntyre
Karma: 504
4 Common (Hedonic) Prediction Failures and How to Fix Them
Meetup : Effective Altruism UNSW Social Night
If I remember correctly, CEA et al. decided against pursuing this strategy due to risk adversity. Due to the large downsides which may be unique to EA, it’s not clear—to me at least—that our personal strategy should differ from this. I’d be interested in seeing some more thoughts on this.
Should You Visit an EA Hub?
Meetup : TrivEA Night by Effective Altruism UNSW
Thanks for posting this. I think explicitly asking for critical feedback is very useful.
If the intervention is not currently supported by a large body of research then we want to fund/carry out a randomized controlled trial to test whether it’s worth pursuing this intervention.
RCTs are seriously expensive, would take years to get meaningful data, would need to be replicated as well before you could put much faith in it, and it wouldn’t align with the core skillset I’d imagine you’d need to be starting an organisation (so you’d need to outsource it, which would increase the costs even more). As Ryan said, it might be more useful to useful to aim to be recommended by OPP, or search for another kind of EA market inefficiency. Your other ideas of finding supportable but neglected interventions and doing them sounds pretty useful though.
Hi Eric, thanks for writing these and pointing us to them. I think this is a great idea. I just posted these on our business society and law society Facebook page to test the waters and see what response we’d get from a similar input. Out of interest, what has the response been that you’ve gotten so far?
Thanks for writing this up! It’s very useful to be able to compare this to census data. Did you use the same/similar message for everyone? If so, I’d be interested to see what it was. This sort of thing would also be useful to a/b test to refine it. There is also the option to add people manually, bypassing the need for admin approval; did you contact these people too?
12 Awesome Things You Should Do After EA Global
Hi Kaj,
Thanks for writing this. Since you mention some 80,000 Hours content, I thought I’d respond briefly with our perspective.
We had intended the career review and AI safety syllabus to be about what you’d need to do from a technical AI research perspective. I’ve added a note to clarify this.
We agree that there a lot of approaches you could take to tackle AI risk, but currently expect that technical AI research will be where a large amount of the effort is required. However, we’ve also advised many people on non-technical routes to impacting AI safety, so don’t think it’s the only valid path by any means.
We’re planning on releasing other guides and paths for non-technical approaches, such as the AI safety policy career guide, which also recommends studying political science and public policy, law, and ethics, among others.
We agree these are technical problems, but for most people, all else being equal, it seems more useful to learn ML rather than cog sci/psych. Caveats:
Personal fit could dominate this equation though, so I’d be excited about people tackling AI safety from a variety of fields.
It’s an equilibrium. The more people already attacking a problem using one toolkit, the more we should be sending people to learn other toolkits to attack it.
Great article, thanks Carrick!
If you’re an EA who wants to work on AI policy/strategy (including in support roles), you should absolutely get in touch with 80,000 Hours about coaching. Often, we’ve been able to help people interested in the area clarify how they can contribute, made introductions etc.
Apply for coaching here.
Thanks for writing this!
Just wanted to let everyone know that at 80,000 Hours we’ve started headhunting for EA orgs and I’m working full-time leading that project. We’re advised by a headhunter from another industry, and as suggested, are attempting to implement executive search best practices.
Have reached out to your emails listed above—looking forward to speaking.
Peter
This is such a useful public good. Thank you!!
Is there a way to show my appreciation for an edit?
Often I see excellent edits[1] to the Wiki show up in my Forum homepage, and I would like to be able to show my appreciation to someone[2]. Ideally with low effort and without otherwise adding any value.
Is there a like/upvote button for Wiki edits I’m missing?
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[1] For example, check out how much information this article on iterated embryo selection is collating and condensing. It was written a few months ago, and is now Google’s featured snippet for iterated embryo selection (a sign that Google ‘thinks’ it’s the best, succinct summary of the term).
[2] To be honest this is so frequently Pablo or the EA Wiki Assistant (I think also Pablo?) that I should probably just send a DM.
Awesome, glad to hear that! Thanks, JP!
I imported them into RemNote where you can read all the cards. You can also quiz yourself on the questions using the queue functionality at the top. Or here’s a Google Doc.
If someone was interested in adding more facts to the deck, there are a bunch in these notes from The Precipice. (It’s fairly easy to export from RemNote to Anki and vice versa, though formatting is sometimes a little broken.)
Thanks for the great summary!
For effective altruists, I think (based on the topic and execution) it’s straightforwardly the #1 book you should use when you want to recruit new people to EA.
I really liked the book, and think it’s an important read for folks early in their EA journey but I want to quickly say that I disagree with this claim. The book “doesn’t actually talk much about EA”, so it’d be surprising if it was the best introduction to a field. Statistics is a useful field for understanding and contributing to social science, but it’d be surprising if it was straightforwardly the #1 book to recommend to someone wanting to learn social science.
I think one of my concerns with this would be the consistency and commitment effect created by incentivising a criticism, leading to someone seeing herself as an EA critic, or opposed to these ideas. Similar to companies having rewards for customers writing why it’s their favourite company or product in the world. See also the American prisoners of war of China in the Korean war (I think), having small incentives to write criticisms of America or Capitalism. If it were being seriously considered, it’d be good to see some more done to work out if this would be a real consequence.
Source: Influence, Cialdini.