I work at the Forecasting Research Institute as a Research Analyst. Emergent Ventures Grantee, currently writing about social science at Samstack.io. I previously worked as Research Manager at Social Change Lab.
Sam Glover
Karma: 277
When I saw these emojis popping up on EA twitter accounts, I wondered if the Lib Dems had announced some animal welfare policy I hadn’t heard about or something.
I am very sceptical about the numbers presented in this article. 22% of US citizens have heard of Effective Altruism? That seems very high. RP did a survey in May 2022 and found that somewhere between 2.6% and 6.7% of the US population had heard of EA. Even then, my intuition was that this seemed high. Even with the FTX stuff it seems extremely unlikely that 22% of Americans have actually heard of EA.
This seems very likely to be a coincidence. This appears to be a freshers fair, where different university societies try to recruit new students at the university. Freshers fairs in the UK (and I would imagine it may be similar in New Zealand) generally have lots of different societies trying to appeal to new students. Societies that have nothing to do with each other often have these stalls set up next to each other, and in this case I think it’s very likely that the Palestinian society and the Effective Altruism society stalls were coincidentally next to each other.
Is that GBP or USD?
Thanks for writing this, I found it really interesting.
Thanks so much, awesome that you decided to apply and I’m so happy you enjoy the blog!
If you happened to have read this piece, do you think it’s substantive/useful enough for me to post on EA Forum proper (with a few edits) or is it more suitable as a shortform?
I wrote up a quick FAQ on what the application process is like for Tyler Cowen’s Emergent Ventures program. Generally I think more EAs should apply to EV, it’s low-cost and a good way to get some money to get a project off the ground, and also a good signal of ability for young EAs.
I think it would be useful to know the percentage of women with depression who we would expect to be depression-free after a six month period without any intervention.
Thanks for giving the details, I couldn’t quite remember the full story and should’ve looked it up and quoted directly. I don’t quite know what to make of him doing this—on the one hand, a small lie about being vegetarian doesn’t seem particularly pernicious or noteworthy, especially given he went vegetarian after lying about it. On the other hand, it does at least strike me as somewhat odd to do this if he had just eaten a cheeseburger a few hours earlier. It does update me ever-so-slightly towards thinking that he’s liable to lie if it makes him look good—it might not just be a ‘lie without intending to’ situation.
It’s possibly worth noting that in his conversation with Tyler Cowen he did mention that he had previously lied (briefly) about being vegetarian.
This feels like a weird interpretation of Will’s comment, which doesn’t (in my view) imply that for-profit companies can’t do a lot of harm, but rather that if you start a company with the sole goal of making a profit, usually the worst outcome (with regards to your goal of making a profit) is that you go bankrupt.
Presumably he means because x-risk is short for ‘existential risk’ and can refer to things other than extinction.
Strangely it was Superforecasting by Phil Tetlock, which made me start forecasting on Good Judgment Open. I started interacting with forecasters there, and a load of those guys were into EA, and that’s how I got into it. I think a decent number of people have gone from EA (or rationalism) into forecasting but for me it was the other way around.
This isn’t exactly a comprehensive answer to your question about what’s morally permissible and what isn’t, but my view is that if it’s going to be a huge hassle and expense for you to avoid flying, you shouldn’t make yourself feel awful about the fact that you’ve done something you regard as less than ideal. I would just donate to Clean Air Task Force (probably an amount that will more than cover the impact of the flights in expectation) and continue trying to avoid flights in future when feasible if you think that’s something you want to do.
Thanks, good point! I agree that it’s possible that a backlash could occur a while after the disruptive protests actually took place. That being said, it seems likely (at least to me) that if it were the case that these protests were going to lead to people becoming less supportive of climate policies, there would have been at least some evidence of the backlash in the survey data at the height of, or in the immediate aftermath of, the disruption.
Initially, we had planned only to do two surveys, but decided on commissioning a third when it became clear that JSO were receiving additional media coverage and we wanted to make sure that we captured any impact of the continued media coverage. The protests began on the 1st of April, and our third survey took place on the 19th of April, at which point most survey respondents had heard about the protests (or at least claimed that they had), so our hope is that if there had been a backlash we would’ve picked up on it. That being said, you’re right that if there was a backlash or a change in peoples’ views on climate policies that took place a few weeks after the protests (or at an even later point), our surveys wouldn’t have picked up on it.
Thanks, yeah I think this was an error on my part rather than anything to do with you. I should have looked more carefully, thought I skipped past the recommendations but the default option of subscribing caught me off guard. This is a shame because I’m now more hesitant about recommending other substacks on my own site.
I haven’t exactly changed my behaviour, but the fact that I didn’t read any arguments for donating to global health that I found particularly persuasive means that I’m slightly less likely to change any of my recurring donations (currently 100% animal welfare).