Sanjay

An open let­ter to Holden from a crybaby

• Sanjay 8 Sep 2020 10:48 UTC

  16 points

  on: Are there any other pro ath­lete as­piring EAs?

  Hi Mar­cus, I think this sounds like a great idea.

  There are a num­ber of com­mu­ni­ties that have been cre­ated across the EA space which bring to­gether peo­ple with a pro­fes­sional af­fili­a­tion (I see Aaron has men­tioned REG, which is likely the most similar to your con­cept). I don’t be­lieve this has been done with pro ath­letes be­fore.

  I founded and run a group called SoGive which raises funds and does anal­y­sis on char­i­ties.

  I would be happy to con­nect with you and sup­port you if that would help; I’ll send you a di­rect mes­sage on the EA Fo­rum.

• Sanjay 30 Aug 2020 10:48 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: SoerenMind’s comment on: We’re (sur­pris­ingly) more pos­i­tive about tack­ling bio risks: out­comes of a survey

  Thanks So­eren, this is a use­ful point to help to tease out the think­ing more clearly:

  • Agree that ma­jor in­sti­tu­tions/​gov­ern­ments will in­vest bet­ter in pan­demic pre­pared­ness for some (un­known) num­ber of years from now (bet­ter than re­cently, any­way)

  • Also ex­pect that this work will be in­ad­e­quate, by (for ex­am­ple) overindex­ing/​overfit­ting on what’s hap­pened be­fore (flu with fatal­ity rate of 2.5% or less, or an­other coro­n­avirus), but not an­ti­ci­pat­ing other pos­si­ble pan­demics (Ni­pah, Hen­dra, or man-made)

  • If you had asked me in (say) early April, I would have guessed that ma­jor in­sti­tu­tions will get more fund­ing, and that NGOs who are bet­ter at con­sid­er­ing tail risks and x-risks and tack­ling these overfit­ting er­rors will also get more fund­ing.

  • We now think that those ma­jor in­sti­tu­tions will get more fund­ing, but that the more ex­is­ten­tial-risk-fo­cused NGOs aren’t get­ting ma­te­ri­ally more fund­ing, at the moment

• Sanjay 25 Aug 2020 14:34 UTC

  9 points

  on: Risks from Atom­i­cally Pre­cise Manufacturing

  I raised a similar ques­tion on the Effec­tive Altru­ism fb group last year.

  Notable re­sponses in­cluded the com­ment from Howie Lem­pel which re­it­er­ated the points in the Open Phil ar­ti­cle about how it seemed un­likely that some­one watch­ing the field would fail to no­tice if there was a sud­den in­crease in ca­pa­bil­ities.

  Also Rob Wiblin com­mented to ask to make it clear that 80,000 hours doesn’t nec­es­sar­ily en­dorse the view that nan­otech/​APM is as high a risk as that sur­vey sug­gests.

We’re (sur­pris­ingly) more pos­i­tive about tack­ling bio risks: out­comes of a survey

• Sanjay 29 Jul 2020 16:34 UTC

  4 points

  on: What is a good an­swer for peo­ple new to EA that re­quest ad­vice on vol­un­teer­ing?

  SoGive offers vol­un­teer­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties do­ing char­ity anal­y­sis. If you’re in­ter­ested, get in touch with me via san­jay [at] so­give.org

Cli­mate change dona­tion recommendations

• Sanjay 14 Jul 2020 14:38 UTC

  3 points

  on: Quotes about the long reflection

  I’m slightly con­fused about the long re­flec­tion.

  I un­der­stand it in­volves “maybe <...> 10 billion peo­ple, de­bat­ing and work­ing on these is­sues for 10,000 years”. And *only af­ter that* can peo­ple con­sider ac­tions which may have a long term im­pact on hu­man­ity.

  How do we en­sure that

  (a) ev­ery­one gets in­volved with work­ing on these is­sues? (pre­sum­ably some peo­ple are just not in­ter­ested in think­ing about this? Get­ting peo­ple to work on things they’re un­suited for seems un­helpful and un­pleas­ant)

  (b) Ac­tions that could have a long term im­pact on hu­man­ity could be taken unilat­er­ally. How could peo­ple be stopped from do­ing that?

  I think a to­tal­i­tar­ian wor­ld­wide gov­ern­ment could achieve this, but I as­sume that’s not what is intended

• Sanjay 10 Jul 2020 11:51 UTC

  3 points

  on: Sam Carter: Are cash trans­fers the best policy op­tion?

  Not sure if this is the best place to ask this ques­tion, but does any­one know where we could find more think­ing on cash trans­fers and Dutch dis­ease?

• Sanjay 6 Jul 2020 10:22 UTC

  6 points

  on: Where is it most effec­tive to found a char­ity?

  My short an­swer is:

  Your main rea­son for set­ting up a char­ity is prob­a­bly to provide tax in­cen­tives for your donors. So the best ju­ris­dic­tion is prob­a­bly the ju­ris­dic­tion where your donors are.

  How­ever there are some ex­cep­tions where this doesn’t ap­ply. For ex­am­ple, you may be set­ting up a char­ity solely or pri­mar­ily to ac­cess Google Ad grants.

  If this is the case, then “shop­ping” for the ju­ris­dic­tion with the least reg­u­la­tory over­head would make sense. It would also need to con­sider whether the pro­cess re­quires some­one with an ad­dress in that coun­try.

  I don’t know the an­swer to this, and given that it’s some­thing of an edge case, I don’t know of any­one hav­ing done this com­par­i­son.

• Sanjay 28 Jun 2020 13:43 UTC

  3 points

  on: New EA In­ter­na­tional In­no­va­tion Fellowship

  Thank you for hav­ing the de­sire to en­courage in­no­va­tion. I’m con­fi­dent that fel­low­ships like these can be valuable.

  From other such fel­low­ships that I’ve seen, the suc­cess­ful ones typ­i­cally have some­thing that draws peo­ple to want to ap­ply. This may in­clude, for ex­am­ple, spon­sor­ship from a high-pro­file in­di­vi­d­ual.

  I hope this helps. Good luck!

• Sanjay 28 Jun 2020 0:16 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: Brendon_Wong’s comment on: EA could benefit from a gen­eral-pur­pose non­profit en­tity that offers donor-ad­vised funds and fis­cal sponsorship

  I think the benefits of fis­cal spon­sor­ship were fairly clear from your post.

  • For the ex­am­ple in your first bul­let point, it may be that there are enough donors to war­rant cre­at­ing a DAF, but that still wouldn’t mean the op­tion out­performs deal­ing with an ex­ist­ing DAF provider.

  • For your sec­ond bul­let point, I hadn’t ap­pre­ci­ated this el­e­ment of your post on first read­ing. I ex­pect an ex­ist­ing DAF provider prob­a­bly would be ner­vous about pro­vid­ing this ser­vice. And I could imag­ine peo­ple in the EA com­mu­nity benefit­ing from this. How­ever it would make me ner­vous too—it sounds like the sort of scheme that could be made to look re­ally bad in the hands of the right (or wrong!) jour­nal­ist. But maybe these risks are more sur­mountable than I re­al­ise.

• Sanjay 28 Jun 2020 0:02 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Brendon_Wong’s comment on: EA could benefit from a gen­eral-pur­pose non­profit en­tity that offers donor-ad­vised funds and fis­cal sponsorship

  ″ Are you refer­ring to the DAF or FS side of things, or both? ” Both

  ″ My prior was that it would be fairly straight­for­ward be­cause there are UK DAFs in ex­is­tence, and CEA does both DAF-like and FS-like things to a limited ex­tent (spon­sor­ing EA orgs and run­ning EA funds). ” This is a very rea­son­able, but in­cor­rect line of thought. The Char­ity Com­mis­sion is very clear about the fact that even if some­one else has suc­cess­fully ap­plied for some­thing in the past, it doesn’t mean that some­one else ap­ply­ing for ex­actly the same thing should be al­lowed it in the fu­ture.

  ″ While CEA might have char­i­ta­ble pur­poses that seem re­stric­tive, it doesn’t seem like that’s im­pact­ing their abil­ity to try to do ev­ery­thing un­der the sun. ” I don’t think their pur­poses do seem re­stric­tive. Un­der a care­ful read­ing, as I re­mem­ber it, it’s fairly clear that their ob­jects are ex­tremely broad. This was why my first bul­let sug­gested that CEA could provide this ser­vice.

  ″ You tried to cre­ate a trust to do this be­fore, but it was re­jected be­cause the char­i­ta­ble ob­jects were too broad? ” No, sorry, I may not have been clear on this. The rea­son why I said that an un­in­cor­po­rated en­tity (i.e. a trust) could do this was that a trust *would* (I think!) get ap­proved, even with broad ob­jects. How­ever an in­cor­po­rated char­ity (a CIO, to use the jar­gon) was re­jected for hav­ing too-broad ob­jects, notwith­stand­ing the long list of pre-ex­ist­ing prece­dents whose pat­tern I was fol­low­ing.

  Note that us­ing a trust has down­sides. With a trust, I would recom­mend only fund­ing in­di­vi­d­u­als and non-char­i­ties with ex­treme cau­tion.

• Sanjay 27 Jun 2020 14:28 UTC

  7 points

  on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Could we have bet­ter help for those whose con­tent has been (heav­ily) down­voted?

  I of­ten see peo­ple plain­tively say­ing some­thing like: “My com­ment has been heav­ily down­voted, but I have no idea why!” Can the fo­rum be more helpful for this sce­nario?

  Not sure what the best solu­tion is, but here’s an idea:

  • if some­one’s com­ment/​post has been down­voted enough for it to have net nega­tive sta­tus, the UI al­lows the user to ask for feed­back (e.g. it’s an op­tion when you click on the three dots on the top right hand side)

  • if they ask for feed­back, the fo­rum con­tacts all those who down­voted it and also some high-karma peo­ple and links to the con­tent and asks for feed­back (which they don’t have to give, and which would be anony­mous)

  The fea­ture could per­haps in­cor­po­rate ad­di­tional features

  • to in­crease the prob­a­bil­ity that peo­ple provide feed­back, they could be re­mu­ner­ated (this could an al­ter­na­tive use for the Fo­rum prize money, if it was de­cided that fo­rum prizes didn’t in­cen­tivise peo­ple more than the ex­ist­ing karma sys­tem) (per­haps there would need to be some thought given to avoid­ing the per­verse in­cen­tive for peo­ple to give down­votes too liber­ally)

  • the sys­tem could in­cor­po­rate some mechanism to make sure that users don’t overuse/​abuse this fea­ture (e.g. per­haps the user has to write out and sub­mit to the fo­rum what they will do differ­ently in the fu­ture be­fore they are al­lowed to use the fea­ture again)

• Sanjay 27 Jun 2020 11:55 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: EdoArad’s comment on: The Nu­clear Threat Ini­ti­a­tive is not only nu­clear—notes from a call with NTI

  Thanks for ask­ing, and sorry it wasn’t clear from the notes.

  ″ Thou­sands of sites in more than 100 coun­tries house ra­diolog­i­cal sources. Th­ese are usu­ally sealed sources of ra­di­a­tion used to power bat­ter­ies, in­dus­trial gauges or blood ir­ra­di­a­tion equip­ment. In what seems a cruel para­dox, the very same iso­topes used for life-sav­ing blood trans­fu­sions and can­cer treat­ments in hos­pi­tals also can also be used to build a ra­diolog­i­cal “dirty bomb.” ”

  If you want to read more, this is taken from NTI’s web­site: https://​​www.nti.org/​​about/​​ra­diolog­i­cal/​​

• Sanjay 27 Jun 2020 11:54 UTC

  5 points

  on: EA could benefit from a gen­eral-pur­pose non­profit en­tity that offers donor-ad­vised funds and fis­cal sponsorship

  I think there are real benefits to hav­ing an en­tity which can provide fis­cal spon­sor­ship.

  For the Donor Ad­vised Fund (DAF) side of things, I’m less con­vinced.

  • I doubt that there are many peo­ple who would benefit from hav­ing a DAF who can’t already get the benefits that they need from ex­ist­ing DAF providers (i.e. I sus­pect it’s not worth­while to in­vest the c $15k to set this up for such a small num­ber of peo­ple)

  • If there’s more de­mand than I re­al­ise, then I think if we take ev­i­dence of that de­mand to an ex­ist­ing DAF provider, I be­lieve they would be more than happy to provide those peo­ple with that service

• Sanjay 27 Jun 2020 11:45 UTC

  1 point

  on: EA could benefit from a gen­eral-pur­pose non­profit en­tity that offers donor-ad­vised funds and fis­cal sponsorship

  Speak­ing about the UK, it would be hard (im­pos­si­ble?) to set up an en­tity which has broad enough ob­jects to make this work, and which is also in­cor­po­rated. Op­tions include

  • CEA could provide this ser­vice (CEA was set up in the old days when this was eas­ier)

  • A new un­in­cor­po­rated en­tity (a trust) could serve this purpose

  I have tried to do this be­fore, and the ap­pli­ca­tion was re­jected.

The Nu­clear Threat Ini­ti­a­tive is not only nu­clear—notes from a call with NTI

• Sanjay 25 Jun 2020 19:50 UTC

  4 points

  on: Dig­nity as al­ter­na­tive EA pri­or­ity—re­quest for feedback

  Thank you for rais­ing this topic.

  I’m not sure yet whether I’m on board, and in or­der to know the an­swers I would need more in­for­ma­tion.

  • IMPACT: not only how wide­spread is the ex­pe­rience of not be­ing treated with dig­nity, but also how bad is it? I feel that my bank treats me with in­dig­nity as a mat­ter of course, so we need some way to fac­tor in sever­ity of in­dig­nity, and we shouldn’t ac­ci­den­tally take the prevalence of all cases of in­dig­nity (se­vere or oth­er­wise) and then mul­ti­ply them by the most se­vere sever­ity and end up with an overestimate

  • TRACTABILITY: “Dig­nity is also highly solv­able <...> in­clude po­ten­tially highly cost-effec­tive in­ter­ven­tions such as listen­ing” I think the tractabil­ity claim needs more sub­stan­ti­a­tion. Me choos­ing to listen more is cheap. How­ever if I pay you to get cor­rupt offi­cials in the de­vel­op­ing world to be bet­ter ac­tive listen­ers, I would pre­dict poor cost-effec­tive­ness be­cause it prob­a­bly wouldn’t work, I would guess.

  • NEGLECTEDNESS: Defin­ing the in­ter­ven­tions bet­ter will help us bet­ter as­sess ne­glect­ed­ness. How­ever at first glance it seems that it’s prob­a­bly not ne­glected. If we sur­vey lots of aid pro­fes­sion­als and asked them “Do you want your col­leagues and the aid sec­tor as a whole to treat benefi­cia­ries with re­spect” I pre­dict that a very high pro­por­tion will say yes. How­ever if I had a clearer pic­ture of your ac­tion plan, I might con­clude that your par­tic­u­lar ap­proach may well be neglected

  Of these, I think the first (im­pact) is the most im­por­tant. Any con­certed effort on the topic of dig­nity will in­evitably have op­por­tu­nity costs, so we need to un­der­stand why it’s more im­por­tant than some other fac­tors.

  Thank you again for rais­ing a fresh idea. The ques­tions I’m rais­ing are in­tended to be pos­i­tive and en­courag­ing.

• Sanjay 25 Jun 2020 13:00 UTC

  4 points

  in reply to: alexrjl’s comment on: Im­pacts of ra­tio­nal fic­tion?

  I toyed with this idea too. I imag­ined a world where peo­ple could re­mem­ber their past lives, and maybe there was also some way of mak­ing this pub­lic (some way of link­ing face­book pro­files of your cur­rent life with your pre­vi­ous lives?) This was partly in­ter­est­ing be­cause of the im­pli­ca­tions it had for peo­ple’s at­ti­tudes to an­i­mal welfare. (Hindu veg­e­tar­i­anism ap­pears to have been un­usu­ally driven by a de­sire to pro­mote an­i­mal welfare, as op­posed to some other re­li­gious dietary re­stric­tions which origi­nated from hu­man health needs).

  How­ever I think I preferred the world men­tioned ear­lier in the post, where the same con­se­quen­tial­ist util­i­tar­ian frame­work causes your ap­pear­ance to up­date. It means that the feed­back loops are faster. And I think peo­ple care more about be­ing good-look­ing than they do hav­ing a nice time in their next life (even if they had good rea­son to be­lieve that the next life were real).

  The ap­pear­ance-ori­ented idea is also a great mechanism for high­light­ing the fact that in the real world virtue and ap­pear­ance are differ­ent (de­spite the fact that films and other art some­times seem, hor­rifi­cally, to con­fuse the two)