You didn’t mention Portraits of Animals Welfare Society (PAWS) who are also desperate for funding. They believe that our circle of compassion should extend beyond just portraits of humans to include non-human animals as well
Rasool
Karma: 441
Interesting initiative!
Some scattered thoughts:
You might like Anton Howes’ blog, where he discusses invention and progress ~1500-1800. There could be some interesting lessons as people are considering ways of incentivising progress like prizes and impact certificates
I often think about why electricity didn’t immediately revolutionise manufacturing (spoiler: people had to shift their mindset away from thinking of one giant steam engine powering every machine, to having small electric motors at each machine that could be controlled individually)
There are some interesting calls for historical research here. Specifically:
a history of philanthropy
social movements which achieved an outsized impact. For example, the group of early neoliberals clustered around Chicago achieved a wild amount amount of influence, partly through the so-called ‘Chicago boys’.
I’d love to understand more about discontinuous progress in history
There’s a piece here with other history research ideas (and interesting stuff in the comments too)
P.S. Congrats on finishing the Caro book :)
Some others here: https://tomweinresearch.me/job-boards/
Someone accidentally donated $15,000 instead of $150 to their neighbour’s charity in Bangladesh. Before they could get a refund they were inundated with pictures and videos from the grateful recipients.
In addition to then donating $1,500 rather than the $150 as originally planned, they also told the story of their blunder on reddit, which went viral and caused ~3000 people to donate ~$100,000
Warm fuzzies galore
Love this idea!
I wanted to improve the topic page, but wasn’t sure what its best use is, though tutorials / forum posts on each one like you are doing are a great addition.
There are a couple of sites I think could be useful to have tutorials on:
- https://observablehq.com/ which is kind of like guesstimate but with more visualisations. You can build models, simulate them, and then tweak the model parameters and re-run. Here’s an example.
- https://insightmaker.com/ similar to Observable, note the ‘Simulate’ button in the top right corner in this example.
- https://www.kialo.com/ which is like Polis
- https://poller.io/ which I think is easier to use than Vodle
And then there are a bunch of other tools for things which aren’t mentioned in the Topic page but which I still think can be used for collaborative truth seeking, like:
- Mindmaps
- https://markmap.js.org/repl
- Data visualisations
- https://www.datawrapper.de/
- Back of the envelope calculations (BOTEC)
- https://numbr.dev/
- https://cruncher.io/
- https://bbodi.github.io/notecalc3/
- Writing arguments
- https://argdown.org/
- Brainstorming
- https://www.mindwendel.com/
- Storytelling
- https://timelinestoryteller.com/Very happy to chat more!
Reading time estimates on older posts.
If I’m not mistaken, posts before a certain date do not have the estimated time in minutes to read the post near the publication date and author’s name at the top.
In the UK at least, they are especially desperate for donors who are male and/or from an ethnic minority background
https://www.anthonynolan.org/help-save-a-life/join-stem-cell-register
Great interview! I particularly liked the parts about self-signalling and moral offsetting
I look forward to reading others in this series!
Couple of things:
I get the impression you recorded your conversation and then typed it up, is that recording in a shareable format? People like to listen to posts, this might be (or already has been) converted to audio via nonlinear but it might be nice to hear the original
Minor thing but I’d prefer the current speaker to be in bold type (ie. Amber: Tell me about what you’re doing. Tyler: I work for The Humane League.) to make it easier to distinguish a change in speaker
Same general principles apply in the UK—a simple guide is here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/ZwTrykpvztrF5FQQL/how-to-set-up-a-uk-organisation-limited-company-version
A way to report users for deletion.
There are a few spam accounts like this one (https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/users/msreeyaa) but I see no way of reporting them to the moderators.
Since they aren’t posting or commenting the way in which they have an effect is when searching the forum. (You’ll just have to take my word for it that I wasn’t searching for ‘escorts’ when I came across that profile...)
Tyler Cowen believes you should have more children in order to combat climate change...
Amazing work! And great write-up
It’s criminal that this post doesn’t have more attention, and I assumed there’d be a heated competition but here’s my 19:
Playful alteration of a famous quote by Jeremy Bentham.
“disfingerment”
Comparing the number of portraits to the number of cat videos on the internet
Comparison of solving a Rubik’s Cube blindfolded
The inclusion of data “paralysis” and “divination”
The mention of Hogwarts
Holding séances with deceased experts.
The suggestion of using a brain computer interface to consult with ChatGPT
The idea of being prepared to deny everything
The mention of the “Overall Vibes” rating
The organizations’ acronyms, such as PAINT, CARE, CALM, and SUPER, SPEWS, ABLE
The request for $1-70 million to put together a funding application
The acknowledgement of unpaid interns working 31.2 hours per day for two years
The mention of 79 applicants conducting unpaid research trials for the director of research position, without anyone being hired or receiving feedback
The mention of deceased figures like Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, and Frida Kahlo, among others, as having reviewed early drafts of the post
The use of 666 ethically sourced and well-paid monkeys using typewriters for an infinite amount of time to generate the model
The mention of a minor earthquake caused by the powerful model
The idea of excluding participants to create a rounder number with better vibes
The mention of a 113.1% response rate in a survey about SPEWS
For FOI requests in the UK, take a look at https://www.whatdotheyknow.com/
It makes submitting and tracking requests simple—and also public, so everyone can see the outcome
Ctrl+K is a pretty well-known shortcut, for example on Google Docs, and works here too
Thanks for the summary!
You mention that ~9% of Trial Pledgers have gone on to take the GWWC Pledge, do you know what the other 91% did (eg. extend their trial, stop entirely, commit to a smaller pledge like OFTW)?
I’d be interested in seeing your comments David!
ㅤ