Open Phil used to have its own page; see e.g. this version and the revision history for some context. (Disclosure: I wrote the original version of the page.)
riceissa
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Animal Charity Evaluators previously had a page on Wikipedia, but was deleted after discussion. You can see a copy of what the page looked like, which can also be used in case someone wants to write the page.
My guess (based on intuition/experience and without spending any time digging up sources) is that almost all of these do not meet Wikipedia’s general notability guideline, so it is somewhat uncertain as to whether they would survive for long (if someone were to write the page). In other words, they might be deleted like the ACE article.
The Chivers book will likely meet the notability criteria for books (if it hasn’t already).
Can you clarify which timezone is being used to determine whether a post is published in one month vs another? (A post I am curious about was published in March in some timezones but in April in others, so I’m wondering if it was even considered for the March prize.)
I don’t see this as a risk for EA/rationalist types though, and would argue that pretty strongly.
Would you be willing to supply this argument? I am very curious to hear more about your thinking on this, as it is something I have wondered about. (For the sake of transparency, I should mention that my own take is that there is a significant risk even for EAs and rationalists to be overtaken by unscientific thinking after strong psychedelic experiences, and that it takes unusually solid worldviews and/or some sort of personality trait that is hard-to-describe in order to resist this influence.)
I am having trouble interpreting statements like “it does not seem to be on anyone’s agenda” and “not something that anyone has looked at systematically”. Can you say more about where you have looked and what you have rejected? (From the title of the post I expected to see mentions of Arbital, Distill, research debt, the many explanatory pieces published on LessWrong and the EA Forum, work by Michael Nielsen, and Metacademy, to name some projects that I have seen mentioned and discussed by effective altruists.)
Even if you’re not interested in orienting your life around helping with x-risk – if you just want to not be blindsided by radical changes that may be coming
[...]
We don’t know exactly what will happen, but I expect serious changes of some sort over the next 10 years. Even if you aren’t committing to saving the world, I think it’s in your interest just to understand what is happening, so in a decade or two you aren’t completely lost.
And even ‘understanding the situation’ is complicated enough that I think you need to be able to quit your day-job and focus full-time, in order to get oriented.
Raymond, do you or Andrew Critch have any concrete possibilities in mind for what “orienting one’s life”/”understanding the situation” might look like from a non-altruistic perspective? I’m interested in hearing concrete ideas for what one might do; the only suggestions I can recall seeing so far were mentioned in the 80,000 Hours podcast episode with Paul Christiano, to save money and invest in certain companies. Is this the sort of thing you had in mind?
The way I am imagining it, a person thinking about this from a non-altruistic perspective would then think about the problem for several years and would narrow this list down (or add new things to it) and act on some subset of them (e.g. maybe they would think about which companies to invest in and decide how much money to save, but to not implement some other idea). Is this an accurate understanding of your view?
I’m not sure how novel that is, but I’ve never seen it before
Ben Hoffman discussed this back in December 2016 (his recent posts don’t do this though), and he seems to cite Arbital propositions as inspiration.
I’m not sure if Elizabeth got the idea from Ben or if Ben came up with the idea.
There is https://ea.greaterwrong.com/.
See also this comment announcing it.
I have two questions:
Is there a full list of grantees and respective grant amounts for the referral-based round?
Is there some sort of evaluation process for funded projects that have concluded? I am curious especially about the outcomes of the projects that were funded in the 2017 round (that have now had the money for about a year). This question was asked about a year ago, but the details seemed uncertain at the time so I am re-asking the question.
Sheon Han’s repository was made private. There are more more discussion threads here.
So far almost all DLW work by me has been contract work paid by Vipul, and my guess is it will stay like this for the foreseeable future. We have not sought other sources of funding, but are interested in receiving funding (for my ongoing work).
As mentioned in the post, the intended audience is something like “people who think about effective giving, flow of money in the non-profit world, real-world decision making, and similar topics”. To give some examples:
Ryan Carey has a GitHub repository with data analysis of Open Phil’s grants data. (Last updated 2018-02-11.)
Here is another example, but part of a closed Facebook group so I won’t describe it. (Probably last updated around 2018-01-14.)
Michael Dickens wrote a post entitled “Where Some People Donated in 2017” recording where some EA and EA-peripheral people donated. (Last updated 2018-02-14.)
In June 2017, there was a Facebook event called “What’s Up With the Open Philanthropy Project?” The event looked at some of Open Phil’s work, compiling some documents about some of Open Phil’s grants in the process. Looking at the timestamps, I think the Google Docs were created when the meetup began, and were filled in during the course of the meetup. (Last updated 2017-06-09.)
I think in all the above cases, either the current version of DLW or an improved version in the future performs a superset of the data collection/analysis, is continually updated, and provides a single location for all the data and analysis.
Vipul has also made comments (1, 2) and at least one post using in part data collected by DLW, to make observations or answer people’s questions.
Anders Sandberg’s Flickr account has a 2014 photo of a whiteboard from FHI containing estimates for the following statements/questions:
Probability that >50% of humans will die in a disaster in next 100 years
Are we living in a computer simulation created by some advanced civilization?
Your credence that humanity goes extinct in the next 100 years – replacing us with something better (e.g. WBE) doesn’t count
Your credence that AGI is developed by 2050 (on Earth)
The photo caption is:
Office guesses at (A) a disaster killing 50%+ of humanity in the next century, (B) our reality turning out to be a simulation, (C) extinction within a century, and (D) artificial general intelligence before 2050.
This is based on earlier Aumann agreement experiments we did. Credences are free to update as we see each other’s views, as well as get new evidence.
There are two other photos showing parts of the same (or similar) whiteboard.
HT: Louis Francini for originally pointing me to these photos.
To add to the list of references in this thread, Brian Tomasik talks about this in “Gains from Trade through Compromise” in the section “Epistemic prisoner’s dilemma”.
(Context: I host the Cause Prioritization Wiki.)
I think there might be a misunderstanding here, so I would like to clarify a couple of things.
I also don’t want the fact that one person has done the project at one point to mean that no one can ever do the project again.
I assume this is referring to me, and that Peter is saying the Cause Prioritization Wiki is dead. It’s true that the wiki was inactive for about two years, but more recently I’ve been adding more content to it; there is an edit history graph showing activity for the past year.
But even assuming the wiki is dead, I’m not sure starting essentially from scratch is better than reviving the existing project.
We mainly chose to go with a different wiki software to improve the editing experience (especially editing without creating an account) to remove barriers to contribution.
The choices of wiki software and of allowing anonymous edits are not unchangeable. For the former, I’ve actually been pondering for a while whether switching to MediaWiki would be a good idea (I haven’t looked into Wiki.js, which is what PriorityWiki uses), as I’ve gotten more experience with editing on MediaWiki wikis since the time when I started the Cause Prioritization Wiki. For the latter, my thinking has been that I don’t want to spend a lot of time moderating the wiki, which is why I chose to restrict account creation and disable anonymous edits. But if there is enough energy to moderate the wiki, I would be fine with allowing more open editing.
Some thoughts I had about competition while thinking about this situation (I haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about this topic):
In general I think competition benefits end users.
There are four existing wikis about bitcoin that I know of, which might be an interesting case study:
With free software, forking is often difficult (existing codebase too complicated to understand, written for a different OS, written in a language that one is unfamiliar with) so there’s a proliferation of similar applications. This seems to be less of a problem for prose.
Again with free software, different software projects focus on different (sometimes incompatible) things, like speed, feature-richness, memory use, portability. With a wiki, there is still some of that (one can trade off along formal vs informal language, background knowledge assumed, audience’s goals) but I think it’s less strong.
Again for software, there is also the issue of getting stuck in local optima (think how horrible LaTeX is but people are forced to use it). I think Wikipedia is similarly a local optimum for a generic encyclopedia, but this seems mostly problematic because of its deletionism.
For products that are sold there is also competition along price.
For textbooks, I think it’s good that there are a bunch of them for each (topic, level) combination, because exposition style/difficulty can vary significantly. I think for general reference works there is a lot less of that, and even less for inclusionist electronic wikis.
Re top MIRI donors, there is a 2013 in review post that talks about a survey of “(nearly) every donor who gave more than $3,000 in 2013” with four out of approximately 35 coming into contact via HPMoR. (Not to imply that this is the survey mentioned above, as several details differ.)
How does this compare to EA Ventures?
I would find HTTPS support useful.
I am fine with this plan. Feel free to reply here or message me directly if you run into difficulties or have any further questions.
Hi Ben, thanks for the suggestion. I would be fine with moving the active work to the EA Wiki, but I see two challenges: (1) the EA Wiki uses MediaWiki markup instead of Markdown; (2) the EA Wiki tends to use CC BY-SA instead of CC BY-NC-SA as its license, so GiveWell’s original license would need to explicitly be maintained.
The EA Forum Reader I made a while ago has the ability to do this. The top view shows posts in order of score, and one can filter by various date ranges (“Restrict date range: Today · This week · This month · Last three months · This year · All time” exactly like on the old forum). In addition, the “Archive” links (in the sidebar on desktop, or at the bottom of the page on mobile) in the top view show the top posts from the given time period, so e.g. one can view the top posts in 2018 or the top posts in February 2019.