Richard_Batty

Effec­tive al­tru­ism read­ing list

• Richard_Batty 16 Jan 2015 21:14 UTC

  11 points

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  on: Sup­port­ive scep­ti­cism in practice

  This is nice and practical—it’s good that it focusses on specific behaviours that people can practice rather than saying anything that could come across as “you’re alienating people and you should feel bad”.

  One thing I’d add to this is to try to debate less and be curious more. Often discussions can turn into person A defending one position and person B rebutting this position and defending their own. I’ve found that it is often more helpful for both people to collaborate on analysing different models of the world in a curious way. Person A proposes a model of how the world works and person B the starts trying to understand person A’s model—what its assumptions are, where it applies, and where it doesn’t. They can then contrast this with other models of the world and try to work together to find out which is best. If you want to get really into it, drawing diagrams can help both because it helps you think and because it increases the sense that you are working together on a problem, rather than arguing against one another. But it doesn’t have to be this formal—it could just be a friendly discussion about the strengths and weaknesses of different ideas.

  On a related note, I think it’s important to realise that people don’t always believe the positions they’re arguing for. I’ll often tell my friends an idea because I’m interested in working out it’s strengths, weaknesses, and implications. If they’re dismissive and try to argue against it I feel that they’re missing the point—it would be more helpful to explore the idea’s strengths and weaknesses together rather than turning it into a debate. This would help us to be more accepting of new ideas that don’t come from the usual EA sources.

• Richard_Batty 21 Jan 2015 19:38 UTC

  8 points

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  on: EA house­mates: a good idea? Plus how to find them

  I started the ball rolling on a London EA house just by posting to the London EA facebook group asking if anyone was interested. Lots were, and we ended up with two houses. It’s been a huge boost to my happiness and productivity.

  One piece of advice: don’t overanalyse things, just get going. I watched a huge email thread develop on the London LessWrong google group about setting up a rationalist house. It never got anywhere because they just spent ages arguing about the best way to handle housework, resolve disputes etc. With the London EA house we just worked out which locations we wanted to live in and then we started looking.

• Richard_Batty 24 Feb 2015 19:10 UTC

  7 points

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  on: Six Ways To Get Along With Peo­ple Who Are To­tally Wrong*

  Do you have any examples of successful ‘broad tent’ social movements that we can learn from?

  One example would be science, which is like effective altruism in that it is defined more by questions and methods than by answers.

  One counterexample might be liberal christianity, which is more accepting of a diversity of views but has grown much more slowly than churches with stricter theology. This phenomenon has been studied by sociologists, one paper is here: http://​​www.majorsmatter.net/​​religion/​​Readings/​​RationalChoice.pdf

• Richard_Batty 9 Jul 2015 14:14 UTC

  3 points

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  on: The first .im­pact Workathon

  We held a similar thing in London a few weeks ago and I was planning to organise another one. But we could join in with your .impact workathon instead.

  The only difficult thing is that Pacific time is quite far from UK time. We could at least have some overlap though.

• Richard_Batty 10 Jul 2015 11:59 UTC

  3 points

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  in reply to: Ozzie Gooen’s comment on: The first .im­pact Workathon

  And if Australia joins in then the sun will never set on the .impact workathon :)

  I’ll join in for a bit this week and then for the next one I’ll publicise to more people and set up a London location for it.

• Richard_Batty 7 Sep 2015 11:36 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: [deleted]’s comment on: Per­ma­nent So­cietal Im­prove­ments

  I not sure I understand your argument. Could you help me out with some examples of:

  • Effective Altruists “wandering in a vast intellectual wasteland wearing blindfolds and talking about how great it would be if you could direct humanity to the Great Lakes”

  • How an understanding of human evolution would help us to find out what we ought to do.

• Richard_Batty 7 Sep 2015 11:43 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Per­ma­nent So­cietal Im­prove­ments

  Have you seen Nick Beckstead’s slides on ‘How to compare broad and targeted attempts to shape the far future’?

  He gives a lot of ideas for broad interventions, along with ways of thinking about them.

• Richard_Batty 22 Nov 2015 11:34 UTC

  1 point

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  on: An em­bar­rass­ment of riches

  This is a really interesting and well-written post. I particularly liked the Jane Addams story and the Paul Farmer quote—they really drive home the message.

An­nounc­ing the Good Tech­nol­ogy Project

• Richard_Batty 13 Jan 2016 13:27 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Gleb_T’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Good Tech­nol­ogy Project

  Thanks for asking this as it’s made me think more carefully about it.

  Partly it’s separate just because of how we got started. It’s a project that Michael and I thought up because we needed it ourselves, and so we just got going with it. Given that we don’t work for 80,000 Hours, it wasn’t part of it.

  But the more important question is ‘Should it become part of 80,000 Hours in the future?’ We talked to Ben Todd from 80,000 Hours and asked him what he thought of the potential for overlap. He thought it wasn’t an issue as 80,000 Hours doesn’t have time to go in depth into technology for good. I think if we became a subproject of 80,000 Hours, it would harm them because they’d have to spend management time on it and they should focus instead on their core priorities. It’s costly to build our own brand, but I think it’s better than disrupting an existing organization with an experimental project outside their own priorities. We can also find other ways of cooperating short of merging. I imagine 80,000 Hours will want to use our research if it becomes good enough, and we will want to talk to advisees of theirs who are interested in tech for good. We’ll also be looking for ways to collaborate with other EA orgs like .impact and the London Good Code meetup.

  There are also advantages to being independent of an existing project. We can target our brand more precisely at technologists and prioritize building relationships with people and orgs in the tech community. There’s also value in thinking and researching independently of existing EA orgs because we might be able to come up with different ideas and ways of doing things.

  I think there’s a good chance that we’ll look less and less like 80,000 Hours as we go on. I used to work for them, which means I’m prone to copy their way of doing things. As we go on, we might find that it’s better to have a strategy less like 80,000 Hours than it is now.

  Do you think it would be better if we were part of 80,000 Hours? What would that look like?

• Richard_Batty 13 Jan 2016 20:34 UTC

  4 points

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  in reply to: number42’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Good Tech­nol­ogy Project

  I agree that this can be a problem. I’ve previously found myself demoralised after suggesting ideas for projects only to be immediately met with questions like ‘Why you, not someone else?’, ‘Wouldn’t x group do this better?’ I think having a cofounder helps greatly with handling this. It’s also something that founders just have to learn to deal with.

  In this case though, I think Gleb_T’s question was good. We explicitly asked for feedback and we wanted to get questions like this so that we were forced to think through things we may not have properly considered. On a post like this, I’d rather have lots of feedback and criticism so that we know where the potential weaknesses of the project are.

  I’d suggest the heuristic: If you’re friend is enthusiastically telling you about a new idea, hold off on criticism for a while whilst you help them develop it. If someone asks for feedback, or if you’ve been discussing the project for a bit longer, give the most useful feedback you can, even if it’s negative.

  Thanks for your comments about the benefits of staying independent.

• Richard_Batty 16 Jan 2016 16:52 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: matcarey’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Good Tech­nol­ogy Project

  I’m a little unclear on what your project involves, could you email me at richard@goodtechnologyproject.org and we can talk further.

• Richard_Batty 17 Jan 2016 13:47 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: An­nounc­ing the Good Tech­nol­ogy Project

  Your suggestions are good and we can imagine doing them in the future, but I think we should prioritise the research problem for reasons I’ll explain.

  For your matching developers with projects scenarios (e.g. conference or prizes), they would make sense if:

  • We already knew what the most effective software projects were

  • There was an undersupply of software developers taking them up, perhaps because they didn’t know about them

  We think that there is some truth in this—it’s hard to find lists of tech orgs of any type, and there aren’t many lists of tech orgs that plausibly have a high positive impact. However, I don’t think we’re anywhere close to knowing what the most high impact software projects or organisations are. We are planning to publish a list of altruistic tech organisations, although we’ll be unable to prioritise them until we have made more progress on research.

  There’s an analogy with early 80,000 Hours or GiveWell here. Early 80,000 Hours could have put all its effort into promoting what it thought at the time was the best way to have impact—earning to give. As we’ve found out, this would have been a mistake. By focussing on research they’ve developed much better advice than ‘everyone should do earning to give’.

  Similarly GiveWell or Giving What We Can could have just picked a few charities that on the face of it seemed high impact and then worked on finding donors for them. If they’d done this and then stopped researching, they probably wouldn’t have found the options that they have now, nor would they be as credible for donors.

  On running informal meetings:

  This could have a couple of purposes:

  1. Matching people with orgs or other people so they can work on important projects

  2. Getting people talking about high impact tech so that we can make progress on working out what tech is high impact

  I’ve addressed point 1 already. On point 2, I don’t think meetups or conferences are the best way to make progress. The questions we are trying to answer are very difficult and I don’t think people informally talking will cause much progress to happen.

  Imagine if EA had started with some people asking ‘How can we have the most impact?’ and then instead of setting up organisations like GiveWell and 80,000 Hours, they had immediately concentrated on community, running conferences and meetups. I think we might have ended up like the conventional ethical sector—lots of people doing things and lots of ideas, but not much progress on prioritisation.

  A stronger version of this option would be a more formal structure. There could be a forum (in person or online) for dedicated people to try to make progress on these questions. I think this could be a good option although we’d need to think about how to keep quality high.

  I read Givewell’s ‘Science policy and infrastructure’ proposal but I don’t see how it relates to our project. What kinds of software regulation might we lobby politicians to change?

• Richard_Batty 29 Jan 2016 20:22 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Tom_Ash’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism Pre­dic­tion Registry

  Augur (http://​​www.augur.net/​​) - a decentralised prediction market.

• Richard_Batty 6 Feb 2016 15:13 UTC

  5 points

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  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Effec­tive Altru­ism Lon­don – a re­quest for funding

  Yes, Sam is very good at meeting new people and getting them excited about EA. And already in his spare time he’s achieved a great deal with EA London.

• Richard_Batty 6 May 2016 16:27 UTC

  7 points

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  on: Up­date on the New EA Hub

  I’m glad you’re doing work on this—it’s a potentially very valuable project. I think we could go about it in a different way though. There’s a risk of analysis paralysis in trying to find the optimal location in advance so that we can commit to something as big as buying and converting property. Instead we could just find the people who are likely to move somewhere cheaper in the next few months (I’m one of those people) and see if we can do it together. We might also want to drop the framing of it as ‘A new EA hub’ at this stage because that makes the task seem big, important, and intimidating. Let’s just experiment with some locations and see how it goes. We’ll learn something about living abroad and we’ll be able to observe existing coworking and coliving setups to see what works.

• Richard_Batty 8 May 2016 21:23 UTC

  2 points

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  on: Up­date on the New EA Hub

  https://​​teleport.org is another source of data on which cities to move to, similar to nomadlist.

• Richard_Batty 8 May 2016 21:44 UTC

  1 point

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  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert’s comment on: Up­date on the New EA Hub

  I agree that you have to do some thinking in advance—you have to choose at least one place to go. However, I don’t think this is a very hard a choice for someone to make because the digital nomad scene has already identified a handful of good places. From my reading of recommended places in digital nomad forums, here are the places that stand out for cutting your living costs whilst doing remote internet-based work if you are from a Western country:

  • Chiang Mai, Thailand

  • Ubud, Bali, Indonesia

  • Medellín, Colombia

  • Prague, Czech Republic

  • Budapest, Hungary

  • Las Palmas, Canary Islands, Spain

  There are only a few of them, and personal preferences will play a big role in which of them each person would prefer. Each person who is seriously interested in being part of this project can choose the location that’s best for them from this or similar lists, and then report back about how it’s going once they’re there.

  My plan is to go to one of the European locations this summer. And if it doesn’t work out, I can always go somewhere else.

  What links here?

  • Richard_Batty's comment on Up­date on the New EA Hub by Eric_Bruylant (10 May 2016 10:18 UTC; 1 point)

• Richard_Batty 10 May 2016 7:38 UTC

  2 points

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  in reply to: Eric_Bruylant’s comment on: Up­date on the New EA Hub

  That makes sense, you’re not preventing your own moving by doing the analysis as you have other reasons for not moving yet.

  Can I suggest an amalgamation of our approaches then:

  Phase 1: Exploration. In this phase, those that can move in the next 4 months move to a location that would be good for them and try to join together with other EAs in doing this. They also try to explore more than one location and report back their findings to the whole group. Those that can’t move that soon but are interested in the idea can contribute through online research. Everyone can help those who are interested in moving with location choice.

  Phase 2: Clumping. In this phase, we take the findings from phase 1 and choose one (or a few) standout locations to concentrate on. We encourage more people to move there, including EAs that have gone to other locations.

  Phase 3: Community-building. Once we’ve got a group of > 15 people we can start to invest in community-building projects such as coliving and coworking spaces and outreach to the local community.

  Each of these phases is useful even if it doesn’t progress to the next phase.

  This approach gets the early adopters moving and gathering useful information whilst also creating the seed group effect that could attract more people in the future.