Math Pedantic/Computer Science Honours interested in Cause Prioritization. Currently working with QURI on Squiggle and Pedant.
SamNolan
Karma: 796
This is currently just a prototype, with many many bugs. I’ve actually joined the team and EA CoLabs. Which is a proper application of the concepts here.
Thanks a lot!
If I was to flesh this out further, it would likely involve a way of proposing EA projects that we could then curate. The form would likely be accessible via the browser, but yes, it’s currently just a very modest proof of concept.
I’ve been seeing you around and have loved some of your posts! The project is meant to try and find both highly skilled but also beginners in EA. I’m not sure what direction it needs to go in, as I kind of want to talk to the people that have proposed this idea in the past to try and get their thoughts on what it should look like. I should probably get in contact with them soon.
A Prototype Application for allocating people to Effective Projects
To me, The Uniting Church of Australia.
It’s probably controversial to list a church, but I walked in to the church and got a bible study on how to effectively help people in global poverty, and absolutely loved it.
I definitely think that Churches are a good place to start for places similar to EA, simply because I find that communities around churches have a lot of what I call “intent to do good”. Particularly, In my experience, they seem to be unusually disposed to help reduce global poverty.
Further, when coming into Christianity, I found that there are concepts that are incredibly similar to Peter Singer’s notion of strong obligation to help the poor. Examples include:“If you wish to be perfect, sell all you own and give to the poor” (Luke 12:33)
“What you do for the least of my brothers and sisters, you do for me” (Matthew 25:40)
I’m so convinced of this, that even though I would call myself an atheist, I still heavily involve myself with my church community in order to try make a difference in the way that people view the church, and to direct the church in ways that we can help more people.
An engineer’s approach to personal finance for effective altruists
Hello!
I’ve read this article as part of the EA Forum Podcast. If you wanted an audio version.
There’s quite a few opportunities I see from looking around in EA. I am doing direct technical work for EA right now.
EA CoLabs
EA CoLabs itself can be framed as a technical problem. It’s the problem of optimally matching different skillsets to different projects to maximise utility. You could definitely tackle it from a fun technical perspective (say, using the Hungarian Algorithm for matching, and using the Australian Skills Classification to describe skills). These however are just my ideas. I may be currently too busy with other things to properly investigate whether this is feasible.
Certificates of Impact and EA Economies
There are a lot of interesting ideas in creating economies around EA. For instance, having people sell products where all proceeds go to charity. I have a friend who wishes to look into using technologies such as blockchain to track coins that can be used to purchase good where the profits end up to Effective Charities.
Improving Infrastructure around Cost Effectiveness Analysis
This is what I’m currently doing as direct work. Cost Effectiveness Analysis are not really done to a very high quality in EA spaces as yet, and it would be nice to see more analysis so that we can make more informed decisions. I see this as a major tooling opportunity, as the state of the art in this area uses excel and a lot of time. This may include improving on technologies like Guesstimate, or building entirely new technologies.
Improving Infrastructure around epistemics and forecasting
The next area I would highlight is that there needs to be better evaluations of things like Cost Effectiveness Analysis, or really any other important calculations or predictions. These evaluations often aren’t really done, and I would love to see proper evaluations say for parameters in GiveWell’s Cost Effectiveness Analysis.
If you are interested in any of these. Please reply/get in contact.