RomeoStevens

Karma: 1,003

RomeoStevens 17 Sep 2014 17:52 UTC
12 points
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on: Introduce Yourself
Hi, I’m a CS student who is planning on earning to give. John Maxwell and I recently started a business (http://www.mealsquares.com) in order to try to improve on the default situation of software developer salaries. We figure we can accomplish several things with the entrepreneur route:
1. Give pretax dollars instead of post-tax salary dollars. (and hopefully more of them of course)
2. Spend more spare time working on effective things, for example helping out other EAs lower frictional costs that prevent them from being maximally effective.
3. Encourage the creation of other EA startups. We think there is some low hanging fruit in this space. (post on this forthcoming)
John and I are both highly interested in X-risk mitigation, which seems to suffer from a tragedy of the commons coordination problem.

RomeoStevens 3 Oct 2014 0:19 UTC
2 points
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in reply to: GRAFD’s comment on: Effective altruism as the most exciting cause in the world
Hey, this is fantastic! But I did want to point to something that helped me a lot, which purchase fuzzies and utilons separately. Personally, I find the most emotionally compelling cause to be euthenasia rights. I’m horrified by the fact that we are literally torturing people with terminal diseases for no reason. Despite how strongly I feel about this, I realized that this wasn’t where I was able to have the highest impact. It is hard to propagate the feelings I have about this cause towards causes I “know” are superior in impact, but it is something I strive to do on an ongoing basis.

Don’t let worry about this discourage you though. Doing something even with uncertainty is ALWAYS better than doing nothing just because of uncertainty.

RomeoStevens 14 Oct 2014 17:12 UTC
1 point
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on: Types of planners and plans for EAs
WRT indefinite vs definite futures: You should be doing both. We often review inside view and outside view for mealsquares. Outside view we try to position ourselves as well as possible given the successes and failures of other similar companies. Inside view we make concrete plans and execute on them believing they will work.

RomeoStevens 30 Oct 2014 20:08 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: NickHorslen’s comment on: How Much Can We Generalize from Impact Evaluations? (link)
Agree, I think this raises the idea that EAs getting directly involved with potentially effective charities could be as effective as earning to give.

RomeoStevens 25 Mar 2015 23:17 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan’s comment on: We might be getting a lot of new EAs. What are we going to do when they arrive?
I really like this and the funnel stuff cribbed from for profit orgs. I see the biggest value add of EA being broadly characterizeable as getting non-profits to start doing all the effective things for profits do.

My guess is that it would be useful to have meetups have a strong component of people talking about earning to give. Their experience with it, how they set it up, etc. A large influx of people means most of them will not be joining EA orgs to work on things directly.

Is anyone working on adapting this guide to EA startups to supply meetups with a default agenda? This should lower the frictional costs associated with organizers who may have access to a venue not knowing what to do.

RomeoStevens 2 Apr 2015 3:39 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Dale’s comment on: April Open Thread
I have seen worry about improving the material living conditions of animals such that people become less concerned with their welfare. I think the idea there is that most of the expected value is in the small chance of a very large shift away from consumption of animals.

RomeoStevens 17 May 2015 22:20 UTC
2 points
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on: May Open Thread
Does anyone have a list of regular meetups and emails for their organizers? I’m interested in trying to get more of the regular meetups posted here to the EA forum.

RomeoStevens 28 May 2015 2:21 UTC
1 point
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on: Solving donation coordination problems
If you are holding back for this reason roll an N sided die and donate if a certain number comes up. N can be tuned such that on average we fulfill fundraisers in a timely manner.

RomeoStevens 8 Jun 2015 4:41 UTC
2 points
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on: [Discussion] What does winning look like?
Hitting sharply diminishing returns on QALYs/$

Currently you can buy decades and decades of QALYs for a year’s salary or less. And that’s just straight forward, low variance, uncontroversial purchases. If you cast your net wider (far future concerns) you could potentially be purchasing trillions of QALYs on expectation. I’ll consider EA to have won once those numbers drop to something reasonable.

RomeoStevens 12 Jun 2015 3:22 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: John_Maxwell’s comment on: I am Nate Soares, AMA!

financial incentives for speculators to cause those unwanted events.

I’ve never understood this argument. There has always been a latent incentive to off CEOs or destroy infrastructure and trade on the resulting stock price swings. In practice this is very difficult to pull off. Prediction markets would be under more scrutiny and thus harder to game in this manner.

To take a step back, this objection is yet another example of one that gets trotted out against prediction markets all the time but which has been addressed in the white papers on the topic.

RomeoStevens 5 Jul 2015 22:06 UTC
4 points
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in reply to: Evan_Gaensbauer’s comment on: July Open Thread
This should be a wiki page IMO. I was looking for a list of thinkers and project leads in the EA space and this was the best resource.

RomeoStevens 12 Jul 2015 6:50 UTC
10 points
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on: The Bittersweetness of Replaceability
Put another way: comparative advantage is hard. It is slightly easier in the charity world because the charity world is less competitive overall, but it is still hard. EA is relatively new and thus has found some underfunded areas, but we should expect the orgs that do well by current EA heuristics to eventually become saturated with funds because there will be a lot of people using EA heuristics to inform their giving. The truly best giving opportunities are expected to be at the frontier: causes where the skills needed to evaluate them are rare. This could be due to technical background, professional connections, etc.

I would propose that something that at least helps alleviate this is EAs pursuing higher variance causes. Low variance causes get snapped up pretty quickly, but there is remarkably little stomach among large donors for funding 20 causes and having 19 of them fail, even if the one that succeeds “pays for” the entire experiment in terms of impact.

RomeoStevens 13 Jul 2015 7:13 UTC
4 points
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on: Should EAs influence corporate giving?
The soft sell seems valuable. I have heard of some successes redirecting from less effective global poverty causes to more effective global poverty causes. This seems good both on the object level and in improving the EA public image.

The more controversial stuff seems actively bad at this point in time.

RomeoStevens 7 Aug 2015 6:56 UTC
0 points
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Why Effective Altruists Should Use a Robo-Advisor

These probably have about the same expected return going forward (we have no reason to believe that the US will have better economic growth than Europe or Japan)

Any pointers to sources on this?

RomeoStevens 29 Sep 2015 3:50 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: MichaelDickens’s comment on: Systematically under explored project areas?
What solutions would I be interested in if they were anonymous? What would I work on if I had a massive safety net?

RomeoStevens 1 Oct 2015 2:13 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Benjamin_Todd’s comment on: Systematically under explored project areas?
Good point. Could schlep blindness be ‘rational’ in that it actually is unwise to pursue many projects that a person will most likely not be able to maintain motivation for over the course of the project?

RomeoStevens 4 Oct 2015 6:21 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Gleb_T’s comment on: Systematically under explored project areas?
Is there a term for the first one? I generally refer to as the concentration of benefits and harms problem.

WRT the second: That reminds me that improving the metrics (such as QALYs) could be very high impact, but I think Stanford METRICS is already working on this?

RomeoStevens 6 Oct 2015 6:23 UTC
1 point
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in reply to: Gleb_T’s comment on: Systematically under explored project areas?
Glancing through their website it doesn’t look like they’re working on anything related so I must be mistaken.

RomeoStevens 27 Oct 2015 9:19 UTC
0 points
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on: Burnout and self-care
You won’t hit all of these all the time, but trying a new one when you’re feeling down is a decent heuristic. https://www.ecu.edu/cs-dhs/rehb/upload/Wellness_Assessment.pdf

RomeoStevens 30 Oct 2015 6:41 UTC
2 points
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on: Improving disaster shelters to increase the chances of recovery from a global catastrophe
Piggybacking Larry Hall’s project to retrofit a missile silo in Kansas could be useful. Someone is already spending the vast majority of the money so it’s just a matter of helping them be more effective.