Brazilian legal philosopher, postdoc in intergenerational justice, financial supervisor, GWWC Pledger Bachelor of Laws, Master and Doctor of Philosophy from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), having published articles and translations in the areas of Political Philosophy, Applied Ethics and Philosophy of Economics – with a recent focus on climate risks, Environmental and Social Responsibility, and intergenerational justice. Post-Doctoral Researcher at the Institute of Philosophy, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, Universidade Nova de Lisboa, integrating the Ethics and Political Philosophy Laboratory (EPLAB) and the project Present Democracy for Future Generations. Also a member of the Graduate Committee and Special Studies Analyst in the area of supervision of non-banking institutions at the Central Bank of Brazil (BCB). Member of the Inclusive and Sustainable Solutions association (SIS) and of the Effective Altruism community in Brazil (AE Brasil). https://philpeople.org/profiles/ramiro-avila-peres
Ramiro
Before you comment in response to this post, I would urge you to assume that lawyers for the FTX Group will see your comments.
In that case, I suggest they consider taking a look at the Earning to Give part of 80000 hours website
I have a slightly less rosy picture of this report. Let me illustrate it with some excerpts:
1. The second SIR [Serious Incident Report]
Following the opening of the inquiry, the trustees filed a second SIR on 12 February 2023 as they became aware of a historic safeguarding incident involving one of the former trustees prior to that individual’s appointment as a trustee of the charity.
From the Findings:
The trustees then reviewed and updated their safeguarding policies and procedures and whilst these revised policies and procedures were generally in accordance with the Commission’s guidance, there was scope for further revision to provide more robust safeguarding. The Commission provided the trustees with regulatory guidance and advice in accordance with s.15(2) of the Act about this. The individual named in the SIR resigned from their position at the charity.
Is this about OCB?
2. On conflicts of interest
[…] The inquiry noted that whilst the charity had provisions within its governing document which explained how to manage conflicts of interest there was no formal training or guidance provided to trustees or employees as to what would constitute a conflict of interest, how to raise it or how it should be managed and resolved.
The inquiry found that the trustees were not required to disclose potential conflicts of interest when joining the trustee board, and such a requirement was only introduced in October 2022.
[…]
The inquiry found that the charity had financial policies and procedures but that these were not adhered to or reviewed regularly as the charity’s income grew. It was only in 2022 did the charity have a dedicated finance team to monitor and control the charity’s finances. This lack of control highlights a weak point which the inquiry notes has now been remedied by the charity.
I am glad that the Inquiry found no evidence of malfeasance. But I also think that, for a movement partly based on a critique of the lack of effectiveness of the philanthropy sector, finding out that one of its core organizations lacked some basic controls is a bit frustrating.
you’re already a record-breaker in my heart
Time to cancel my Asterisk subscription?
So Asterisk dedicates a whole self-aggrandizing issue to California, leaves EV for Obelus (what is Obelus?), starts charging readers, and, worst of all, celebrates low prices for eggs and milk?
Anyone else consders the case of Verein KlimaSeniorinnen Schweiz and Others v. Switzerland (application no. 53600⁄20) of the European Court of Human Rights a possibly useful for GCR litigation?
I never said Stoics reflected on GCR
Elon Musk? So last year… 2024 is time for Trump scandals.
Let’s buy some Truth shares and produce new scandals!
you can totally have scandals involving dead or imaginary people. So, definitely no.
I’m not sure where is the best place to share this, but I just received a message from GD that made think of Wenar’s piece: John Cena warns us against giving cash with conditions | GiveDirectly (by Tyler Hall)
Ricky Stanicky is a comedy about three buddies who cover for their immature behavior by inventing a fictitious friend ‘Ricky’ as an alibi. [...]When their families get suspicious, they hire a no-name actor (played by John Cena) to bring ‘Ricky’ to life, but an incredulous in-law grills Ricky about a specific Kenyan cash transfer charity he’d supposedly worked for. Luckily, actor Ricky did his homework on the evidence.
So I just replied GD asking:
Did John Cena authorize you to say things like “Be like John Cena and give directly”? Or this is legally irrelevant?D’you notice that you’re using a fraudster as an example?
Even if one accepts that what Cena’s character (Stanicky-Rod) is true, he’s misleading other people; so the second thing that should come to mind when one reads your message is “so what makes me confident that GD is not lying to me, too?”At least add some lines to assure your donors (maybe you see them more as customers?) are not being similarly fooled.
I’m possibly biased, but I do see that as an instance of an EA-adjacent collaborator failing to put himself in the donors shoes. But I guess it might be an effective ad, so it’s all for the best?
As a civil servant from a developing country, I can say that those estimates mean almost nothing. I don’t think they are well invested, and they are tiny in comparison to adaptation gaps
I think there’s a huge problem of prioritization when it comes to adaptation investment—because developing countries seldom link infrastructure resilience to adaptation policies
[Late Draft Amnesty] Premeditatio malorum – or why the End of the World doesn’t have to be “the end of the world”
I think there’s a relevant distinction to be made between field building (i.e., developing a new area of expertise to provide advice to decision-makers—think about the history of gerontology) and movement building (which makes me think of advocacy groups, free masons, etc.). Of course, many things lie in-between, such as neoliberals & Mont Pelerin Society.
FWD: Invitation to the Future Generations Initiative Launch EventWe are delighted to extend an official invitation to you for the official launch of the Future Generations Initiative, which will take place on February 21, from 16.00 to 18.00 at Atelier 29 - Rue Jacques de Lalaing 29, 1000 Brussels, and will also be streamed online.
To confirm your attendance, kindly fill out this short registration form by Monday, February 19, at 18.00 CET.
There is an urgent need for the EU to embed the rights of Future Generations in its decision-making processes. However, a model for such representation is currently lacking.
A diverse group of NGOs is working together to convince decision makers that the time to act for Future Generations is now. On February 21, we will launch our coalition to promote this important issue as we approach the EU elections and the next political cycle begins.
You can find the event agenda by following this link.
By completing the registration form, you have the option to attend either in person or virtually.
The event will feature the presentation of the Future Generations proposal and policy demands, and a reception will follow.
Please do not hesitate to reach out to marco@thegoodlobby.eu should you have any questions.
Thinking about this one year later, I realize that Global Catastrophic events are much like Carnival in Brazil: unlivable climatic conditions, public services are shut down, traffic becomes impossible, crowds of crazy people roam randomly through the streets… but without Samba and beaches, of course (or, in the case of Curitiba, without zombies selling you beer)
but your song was actually written as an apolyptic message: https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eva_(can%C3%A7%C3%A3o_de_Umberto_Tozzi)#:~:text=A%20letra%20da%20can%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20mistura%20fic%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20cient%C3%ADfica%20p%C3%B3s%2Dapocal%C3%ADptica%20com%20inspira%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20na%20B%C3%ADblia%20e%20%C3%A9%20narrada%20por%20um%20homem
For more, see this brilliant podcast: https://globoplay.globo.com/podcasts/episode/choque-de-cultura-ambiente-de-musica/7b0c4362-3a28-4ed4-be45-e6786aaba9f9/
How consistent are “global risk reports”?
We know that the track record of pundits is terrible, but many international consultancy firms have been publishing annual “global risks reports” like the WEF’s, where they list the main global risks (e.g. top 10) for a certain period (e.g., 2y). Well, I was wondering if someone has measured their consistency; I mean, I suppose that if you publish in 2018 a list of the top 10 risks for 2019 & 2020, you should expect many of the same risks to show up in your 2019 report (i.e., if you are a reliable predictor, risks in report y should appear in report y+1). Hasn’t anyone checked this yet?
If not, I’ll file this under “a pet project I’ll probably not have time to take in the foreseeable future”
Let me briefly try to reply or clarify this:
I think there is a massive difference between one’s best guess for the annual extinction risk[1] being 1 % or 10^-10 (in policy and elsewhere). I guess you were not being literal? In terms of risk of personal death, that would be the difference between a non-Sherpa first-timer climbing Mount Everest[2] (risky), and driving for 1 s[3] (not risky).
I did say that I’m not very concerned with the absolute values of precise point-estimates, and more interested in proportional changes and in relative probabilities; allow me to explain:
First, as a rule of thumb, coeteris paribus, a decrease in the avg x-risk implies an increase in the expected duration of human survival—so yielding a proportionally higher expected value for reducing x-risk. I think this can be inferred from Thorstad’s toy model in Existential risk pessimism and the time of perils. So, if something reduces x-risk by 100x, I’m assuming it doesn’t make much difference, from my POV, if the prior x-risk is 1% or 10^-10 - because I’m assuming that EV will stay the same. This is not always true; I should have clarified this.
Second, it’s not that I don’t see any difference between “1%” vs. “10^-10″; I just don’t take sentences of the type “the probability of p is 10^-14” at face value. For me, the reference for such measures might be quite ambiguous without additional information—in the excerpt I quoted above, you do provide that when you say that this difference would correspond to the distance between the risk of death for Everest climbing vs. driving for 1s – which, btw, are extrapolated from frequencies (according to the footnotes you provided).
Now, it looks like you say that, given your best estimate, the probability of extinction due to war is really approximately like picking a certain number from a lottery with 10^14 possibilities, or the probability of tossing a fair coin 46-47 times and getting only heads; it’s just that, because it’s not resilient, there are many things that could make you significantly update your model (unlike the case of the lottery and the fair coin). I do have something like a philosophical problem with that, which is unimportant; but I think it might result in a practical problem, which might be important. So...
It reminds me of a paper by the epistemologist Duncan Pritchard, where he supposes that a bomb will explode if (i) in a lottery, a specific number out of 14 million is withdrawn, or if ( (ii) a conjunction of bizarre events (eg., the spontaneous pronouncement of a certain Polish sentence during the Queen’s next speech, the victory of an underdog at the Grand National...) occurs, with an assigned probability of 1 in 14 million. Pritchard concludes that, though both conditions are equiprobable, we consider the latter to be a lesser risk because it is “modally farther away”, in a “more distant world”; I think that’s a terrible solution: people usually prefer to toss a fair coin rather than a coin they know is biased (but whose precise bias they ignore), even though both scenarios have the same “modal distance”. Instead, the problem is, I think, that reducing our assessment to a point-estimate might fail to convey our uncertainty regarding the differences in both information sets – and one of the goals of subjective probabilities is actually to provide a measurement of uncertainty (and the expectation of surprise). That’s why, when I’m talking about very different things, I prefer statements like “both probability distributions have the same mean” to claims such as “both events have the same probability”.
Finally, I admit that the financial crisis of 2008 might have made me a bit too skeptical of sophisticated models yielding precise estimates with astronomically tiny odds, when applied to events that require no farfetched assumptions—particularly if minor correations are neglected, and if underestimating the probability of a hazard might make people more lenient regarding it (and so unnecessarily make it more likely). I’m not sure how epistemically sound my behavior is; and I want to emphasize that this skepticism is not quite applicable to your analysis—as you make clear that your probabilities are not resilient, and point out the main caveats involved (particularly that, e.g., a lot depends on what type of distribution is a better fit for predicting war casualties, or on what role tech plays).
Sobre pensar no pior
Something that surprised me a bit, but that is unlikely to affect your analysis:
I used Correlates of War’s data on annual war deaths of combatants due to fighting, disease, and starvation. The dataset goes from 1816 to 2014, and excludes wars which caused less than 1 k deaths of combatants in a year.
Actually, I’m not sure if this dataset is taking into account average estimates of excess deaths in Congo Wars (1996-2003, 1.5 million − 5.4 million) - and I’d like to check how it takes into account Latin American Wars of the 19th century.
I call dibs on writing an April Fool’s post to propose calling this pledge “effective tithe”