Great to see someone giving this a crack! Let me know how it works out. :)
Robert_Wiblin
Karma: 3,004
“The 2.16% U.S. federal funds rate in 2019 is one of the most conservative interest rates possible.”
The U.S. Federal Funds rate has been effectively 0% since April 2020 and was roughly 0% for six years from 2009 to 2015. The same is roughly true of the UK. Central banks in both countries are saying they’ll keep rates low for years to come.
I can’t immediately find a reputable business savings accounts in the UK/US that currently offers more than 1%.
Those that offer the highest rates (something approaching 1%) on comparison sites tend to have conditions (e.g. you lock the money up for a period, or have to keep depositing regularly), and usually have a maximum amount on which you can earn interest, a maximum which is low enough to be binding for these organisations.
These accounts usually offer a high rate to attract customers for a while, then dramatically reduce the interest rate and trust you won’t be bothered moving your money. I think that’s their basic business model.
Opening bank accounts for non-profits, at least in the UK, is a pain — something that will take a few weeks, and some time/attention from the operations team, management and trustees (who are needed for e.g. security checks). It looks like you usually won’t be able to put in more than a million dollars/pounds in any given account, often less.
So you’d need to open many accounts, keep track of them, secure the chequebooks, have them audited annually, integrate them into your bookkeeping system, change the signatures when staff turn over, figure out the idiosyncratic requirements to pull out money when you need to, and so on.
This may sound simple but if you’ve worked in operations you’ll know it’s actually a big hassle.
In return, for each account opened you make <£10k a year, and probably need to keep closing accounts and moving your money into new ones every few years, as the teaser rate used to draw you in is removed.
This may all be worth it, but it’s far from a no-brainer, as these organisation have other fruitful projects they could be using staff to pursue.
In addition to the issues raised by other commentators I would worry that someone trying to work on something they’re a bad fit for can easily be harmful.
That especially goes for things related to existential risk.
And in addition to the obvious mechanisms, having most of the people in a field be ill-suited to what they’re doing but persisting for ‘astronomical waste’ reasons will mean most participants struggle to make progress, get demoralized, and repel others from joining them.
He says he’s going to write a response. If I recall Jason isn’t a consequentialist so he may have a different take on what kinds of things we can have a duty to do.
Want to write a TLDR summary? I could find somewhere to stick it.
It seems like to figure out whether it’s a good use of time for 300 people like you to vote, you still need to figure out if it’s worth it for any single of them.
I’m actually more favourable to a smaller EA community, but I still think jargon is bad. Using jargon doesn’t disproportionately appeal to the people we want.
The most capable folks are busy with other stuff and don’t have time to waste trying to understanding us. They’re also more secure and uninterested in any silly in-group signalling games.
How much does a vote matter?
Yes but grok also lacks that connotation to the ~97% of the population who don’t know what it means or where it came from.
When you shouldn’t use EA jargon and how to avoid it
The EA community seems to have a lot of very successful people by normal social standards, pursuing earning to give, research, politics and more. They are often doing better by their own lights as a result of having learned things from other people interested in EA-ish topics. Typically they aren’t yet at the top of their fields but that’s unsurprising as most are 25-35.
The rationality community, inasmuch as it doesn’t overlap with the EA community, also has plenty of people who are successful by their own lights, but their goals tend to be becoming thinkers and writers who offer the world fresh ideas and a unique perspective on things. That does seems to be the comparative advantage of that group. So then it’s not so surprising that we don’t see lots of people e.g. getting rich. They mostly aren’t trying to. ᾓ7♂️
To better understand your view, what are some cases where you think it would be right to either
not invite someone to speak, or
cancel a talk you’ve already started organising,
but only just?
That is, cases where it’s just slightly over the line of being justified.
For whatever reason people who place substantial intrinsic value on themselves seem to be more successful and have a larger social impact in the long term. It appears to be better for mental health, risk-taking, and confidence among other things.
You’re also almost always better placed than anyone else to provide the things you need — e.g. sleep, recreation, fun, friends, healthy behaviours — so it’s each person’s comparative advantage to put extra effort into looking out for themselves. I don’t know why, but doing that is more motivating if it feels like it has intrinsic and not just instrumental value.
Even the most self-effacing among us have a part of their mind that is selfish and cares about their welfare more than the welfare of strangers.
Folks who currently neglect their wellbeing and intrinsic value to a dangerous extent can start by fostering ways of thinking that build up that endorse and build up that selfishness.
Yep that sounds good, non-profits should aim to have fairly stable expenditure over the business cycle.
I think I was thrown off your true motivation by the name ‘Keynesian altruism’. It might be wise to rename it ‘countercyclical’ so it doesn’t carry the implication that you’re looking for an economic multiplier.
The idea that charities should focus on spending money during recessions because of the extra benefit that provides seems wrong to me.
Using standard estimates of the fiscal multiplier during recessions — and ignoring any offsetting effects your actions have on fiscal or monetary policy — if a US charity spends an extra $1 during a recession it might raise US GDP by between $0 and $3.
If you’re a charity spending $1, and just generally raising US GDP by $3 is a significant fraction of your total social impact, you must be a very ineffective organisation. I could not recommend giving to such a project.
I’d think such a gain would be swamped like other issues like investment returns, us learning about better charities in future, or the worst problems getting solved leaving us worse giving opportunities, and so on.
An exception might be if you independently thought something like GiveDirectly was the best option and wasn’t going to be beaten by another option in future. Then giving money for dispersal during a recession in the recipient country might be, say, twice as good as giving it outside of recession.
There’s a bunch of discussion of these issues in my interview with Phil Trammell.
‘Ugh Fields’, or why you can’t even bear to think about that task
Is there even 1 exclusively about people working at EA organisations?
If someone had taken a different job with the goal of having a big social impact, and we didn’t think what they were doing was horribly misguided, I don’t think we would count them as having ‘dropped out of EA’ in any of the 6 data sets.
“For example 80000 Hours have stopped cause prioritisation work to focus on their priority paths”
Hey Sam — being a small organisation 80,000 Hours has only ever had fairly limited staff time for cause priorities research.
But I wouldn’t say we’re doing less of it than before, and we haven’t decided to cut it. For instance see Arden Koehler’s recent posts about Ideas for high impact careers beyond our priority paths and Global issues beyond 80,000 Hours’ current priorities.
We aim to put ~10% of team time into underlying research, where one topic is trying to figure out which problems and paths go into each priority level. We also have podcast episodes on newer problems from time to time.
All that said, I am sympathetic to the idea that as a community we are underinvesting in cause priorities research.
It seems like lots of active AI safety researchers, even a majority, are aware of Yudkowsky and Bostrom’s views but only agree with parts of what they have to say (e.g. Russell, Amodei, Christiano, the teams at DeepMind, OpenAI, etc).
There may still not be enough intellectual diversity, but having the same perspective as Bostrom or Yudkowsky isn’t a filter to involvement.
Exciting to see a post about this episode 5 hours after we put it out (!).
A few quick thoughts:
“Berkowitz never mentions that the median voter in most Republican primaries is currently “pro-Trump” so he leaves out the single sentence explanation.”
No but I say that. IIRC one of his responses also takes this background explanation as a given.
“Japan and New Zealand have shown that sovereign parliamentary democracies do not manifest even nascent electoral movements.”
In general I’m with you on thinking some systems of government are less conducive to populist movements, but I’m not sure one can show that by choosing two cases without checking for counterexamples.
“Berkowitz argues that Trump drives turnout. But 2016, Trump’s first term, had moderate turnout. 2020 was Trump’s second election, so why is he driving turnout in turn two.”
I mean there’s multiple factors but I’m with Berkowitz here.
In 2020 polls more people had very strong views about Trump (strong approve or strong disapprove) than is typical of a president, while I don’t think that was true in 2016. So I don’t think there’s anything strange about the idea that he raised turnout in 2020 but not 2016.
The other big factor I would think is easier postal voting.
“No it is not. People do not take on high personal costs for collective gains without a facilitating organization.”
But that just raises the question, why weren’t there better facilitating organizations? Folks expected them to be present but it seems they didn’t organize effectively.