Sanjay

• Sanjay 15 Jul 2019 22:20 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Paul_Christiano's comment on: Age-Weighted Voting

  I’m also very ex­cited about this idea. The for­mat of the ul­ti­mate judge­ment (i.e. the ret­ro­spec­tive eval­u­a­tion) seems im­por­tant. A straight­for­ward sur­vey of the pop­u­la­tion suffers from the prob­lem that teas­ing out an an­swer about the qual­ity of a policy is hard, and most peo­ple won’t have put the time or effort in (even as­sum­ing they don’t have a hid­den agenda, as John_Maxwell_IV high­lights). But a sur­vey of ex­perts has its own prob­lems too.

  That said, I sus­pect these is­sues are sur­mountable, and would be keen to see this idea turn into ac­tion.

• Sanjay 15 Jul 2019 7:03 UTC

  35 points

  on: Age-Weighted Voting

  David Moss and I re­cently con­ducted a study with about 500 par­ti­ci­pants look­ing at the ex­tent to which peo­ple place moral weight on the far fu­ture.

  The study found that older peo­ple give much less moral weight to the fu­ture.

  The study in­cluded the fol­low­ing ques­tions:

  • Is it bet­ter to save (A) 1 per­son now or (B) 1/​2/​1,000/​1,000,000 peo­ple 500 years from now? (This is 4 differ­ent ques­tions, one af­ter the other, with differ­ing num­bers of peo­ple stated in op­tion (B))

  • How far do you dis­agree or agree (on a 7-point scale) that:

  • “Fu­ture gen­er­a­tions of peo­ple, who have not been born yet, are equal in moral im­por­tance to peo­ple who are already al­ive”

  • “We should morally pri­ori­tise helping peo­ple who are in need now, rel­a­tive to those who have yet to be born”

• Sanjay 10 Jul 2019 21:41 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: HaukeHillebrandt's comment on: Crowd­fund­ing for Effec­tive Cli­mate Policy

  Your point about ad­vanced economies hav­ing already moved en­ergy in­ten­sive in­dus­tries abroad was re­ally in­ter­est­ing. I hadn’t thought about that. I won­der whether reg­u­la­tion that cov­ers im­ports in ad­vanced economies could be way to tackle that?

• Sanjay 1 Jul 2019 13:09 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: HaukeHillebrandt's comment on: Crowd­fund­ing for Effec­tive Cli­mate Policy

  If reg­u­la­tors don’t think about the un­in­tended con­se­quences, then yes, I agree we risk un­in­tended con­se­quences. But surely the solu­tion is to do reg­u­la­tion well?

  With proper con­sul­ta­tion with in­dus­try, reg­u­la­tion could in­duce in­no­va­tion as Khor­ton sug­gested. With proper thought, it could set the right in­cen­tives and not en­courage out­comes that are only marginally help. In­deed part of the point of lob­by­ing should be to help gov­ern­ments see where they might go wrong and help them to get it right.

  Re your com­ment:

  “How­ever, the ba­sic eco­nomic fact re­mains that if you have two coun­tries, one with reg­u­la­tion, one with less tight reg­u­la­tion, then, all else be­ing equal, there is the po­ten­tial for car­bon leak­age and that’s why many peo­ple worry about eco­nomic com­pet­i­tive­ness. ”

  A large com­pany can­not move to a differ­ent ju­ris­dic­tion at the drop of a hat. If the reg­u­la­tion is done well, with proper con­sul­ta­tion, firms would rather work to­wards a reg­u­la­tion with a proper lead time than move coun­tries.

• Sanjay 23 Jun 2019 23:49 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: HaukeHillebrandt's comment on: Crowd­fund­ing for Effec­tive Cli­mate Policy

  Thanks very much for your replies.

  Re re­search on cli­mate change. Let’s as­sume that we’re at a stage where we’ll shortly be see­ing diminish­ing marginal re­turns on this sort of re­search (as you claim) and that a small amount of ex­tra re­search might be more valuable than a small amount of ex­tra re­search of clean en­ergy. Might that not (maybe) be a bet­ter thing to cam­paign for? E.g. if $1bn of cli­mate change re­search out­performs $10bn of clean en­ergy re­search (ob­vi­ously these are made-up num­bers) then cam­paign­ing for $1bn of ex­tra gov­ern­ment spend might be eas­ier than cam­paign­ing for $1obn of ex­tra spend.

  Re reg­u­la­tion. I worry that your ar­gu­ments are defeat­ing a straw­man of “cam­paign­ing for bet­ter reg­u­la­tion”. Reg­u­la­tion which pushes in­dus­try to move to an­other coun­try is just poor ex­e­cu­tion—it’s an out­come which nei­ther gov­ern­ment nor in­dus­try nor cli­mate ac­tivists want. If done well, reg­u­la­tion should stim­u­late *the pri­vate sec­tor* to perform re­search (e.g. clean en­ergy re­search) in or­der to at­tain the reg­u­la­tory tar­gets. E.g. the reg­u­la­tion might look like: “in­dus­try must at­tain cer­tain stan­dards of cli­mate foot­print/​clean­li­ness by (say) 2035″, where the timelines/​stan­dards have been ne­go­ti­ated with in­dus­try and are at the am­bi­tious end of what is at­tain­able.

Could the crowd­fun­der to pros­e­cute Boris John­son be a high im­pact dona­tion op­por­tu­nity?

• Sanjay 1 Jun 2019 17:57 UTC

  3 points

  on: Crowd­fund­ing for Effec­tive Cli­mate Policy

  Great work Hauke! Love to see this sort of pro­ject sup­ported with this sort of anal­y­sis! Some ques­tions:

  
  (1) Bet­ter un­der­stand­ing the rel­a­tive rank­ings I would be in­ter­ested to know: For “Re­search on cli­mate change”, you say in your spread­sheet that ne­glect­ed­ness is only 2 be­cause “Much re­search fund­ing already in this area and re­turns are prob­a­bly diminish­ing” Do we know how much? (or any other rea­son for think­ing that re­turns are diminish­ing here but not in the clean en­ergy arena?) For Reg­u­la­tion, why is im­por­tance smaller than it is for re­search on clean en­ergy? (or re­search on cli­mate change, for that mat­ter?) For Reg­u­la­tion, why is tractabil­ity scored lower than gov­ern­ments fund­ing re­search when reg­u­la­tion costs (roughly) no money? For Reg­u­la­tion, when I read sec­tion 8 of your doc­u­ment, I wasn’t sure how to in­ter­pret some of your com­ments. You pointed out ways that cur­rent ap­proaches to reg­u­la­tion are sub-op­ti­mal. Does that mean you think there’s an op­por­tu­nity to cam­paign for reg­u­la­tions to be done differ­ently? It seemed to me like a write-up that was very pos­i­tive about reg­u­la­tion.
  

  (2) Can clean en­ergy R&D ac­tu­ally benefit from more fund­ing?

  You said in your piece:

  “Ac­cord­ing to re­cent analy­ses, pub­lic en­ergy R&D can pro­duc­tively ab­sorb large amounts of ad­di­tional fund­ing and should in­crease 5-fold to be so­cially op­ti­mal.”

  The source for that says that the five­fold in­crease is based on “sim­ple calcu­la­tions”. I’ve copied and pasted that be­low (see PS), but it seems that this is based on raw eco­nomics. In other words, it as­sumes (if I un­der­stand cor­rectly) equal tractabil­ity in each of the re­search ar­eas. If so, it begs the ques­tion, to my mind.

  I think re­solv­ing this for me could be done quite sim­ply. It would be suffi­cient to have some­one who is an ex­pert re­searcher say some­thing like: “Yes, if there were billions more dol­lars thrown into this field that would be great be­cause we have loads of leads to fol­low and I could list out a load of them off the top of my head if you wanted me to” and not “To be hon­est, if we had loads more re­source thrown at this, we would be scrap­ing the bar­rel for use­ful things to re­search”

  Alter­na­tively, in your sec­tion on re­search on cli­mate change, you say

  “Fund­ing more re­search on such top­ics might be even be more cost-effec­tive than clean en­ergy R&D fund­ing. How­ever, the over­all fund­ing gap is likely much lower (per­haps in the hun­dreds of mil­lions) than for clean en­ergy R&D (which is in the tens of billions) and so diminish­ing re­turns will set in ear­lier”—Per­haps ex­pand­ing on the ra­tio­nale for this claim might (per­haps) be suffi­cient to satisfy my ques­tion mark on this.

  (3) A cou­ple of other questions

  I also had a look at this 2016 pa­per from Na­ture en­ergy which you linked to: https://​​www.na­ture.com/​​ar­ti­cles/​​nen­ergy201620That pa­per raised a cou­ple of con­cerns which I don’t think were cov­ered in your piece (sorry if they were there and I didn’t spot it)
  - the dis­cus­sion sec­tion sug­gests that the con­straints for fund­ing are likely to come from there be­ing an ad­e­quate pool of sci­en­tist and en­g­ineer­ing per­son­nel available.
  - it also raises the pos­si­bil­ity of gov­ern­ment fund­ing crowd­ing out pri­vate sec­tor fund­ing
  
  PS Source of the 5-fold in­crease es­ti­mate:http://​​jacquelyn­pless.com/​​wp-con­tent/​​up­loads/​​2016/​​08/​​Pless-et-al.-In­duc­ing-and-Ac­cel­er­at­ing-Clean-En­ergy-In­no­va­tion-with-%E2%80%98Mis­sion-In­no­va­tion%E2%80%99-and-Ev­i­dence-Based-Policy-De­sign.pdf
  
  “Our own calcu­la­tions based on 2016 net gen­er­a­tion and av­er­age elec­tric­ity price data from the U.S. En­ergy In­for­ma­tion Ad­minis­tra­tion in­di­cate that these find­ings im­ply that U.S. gov­ern­ment clean en­ergy R&D spend­ing should be about $5.2 billion, com­pris­ing $3.8 billion on wind/​other R&D sub­sidies and $1.4 billion on so­lar R&D sub­sidies. By com­par­i­son, oth­ers have es­ti­mated that ac­tual U.S. 5 gov­ern­ment spend­ing on re­new­able en­ergy R&D in 2016 was only $1.0 billion (FSUNEP, 2017). If these num­bers are cor­rect, gov­ern­ment sup­port should in­crease by roughly five times cur­rent lev­els. This in­crease per­haps should oc­cur grad­u­ally in or­der to avoid high ad­just­ment costs, how­ever re­cent ev­i­dence sug­gests that ad­just­ment costs may not be a press­ing con­cern con­sid­er­ing cur­rent lev­els of pub­lic en­ergy R&D sup­port (Popp, 2016).”
  

• Sanjay 30 May 2019 10:55 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: aarongertler's comment on: Please use art to con­vey EA!

  Thanks Aaron, I have re­moved the writ­ten out text of the table. Ex­pand­ing them was use­ful, thank you for do­ing that.

  Fo­rum own­ers may be in­ter­ested to know that I had as­sumed that click­ing the cor­ner of the image and drag­ging to ex­pand would be pos­si­ble, but af­ter many many at­tempts I gave up.

• Sanjay 27 May 2019 22:48 UTC

  1 point

  on: Does cli­mate change de­serve more at­ten­tion within EA?

  In your piece you said “John Halstead <...> ar­gues that more emis­sions and warm­ing might cre­ate desta­bil­i­sa­tion and nu­clear war, but it’s hard to see ex­actly how.”

  In case it helps, this Economist ar­ti­cle may add some more colour on this: https://​​www.economist.com/​​in­ter­na­tional/​​2019/​​05/​​25/​​how-cli­mate-change-can-fuel-wars

Please use art to con­vey EA!

• Sanjay 22 May 2019 20:59 UTC

  8 points

  on: Why did three GiveWell board mem­bers re­sign in April 2019?

  You may also be in­ter­ested to see the thread about this on the EA face­book group: https://​​www.face­book.com/​​groups/​​effec­tive.al­tru­ists/​​perma­l­ink/​​2209495562440122/​​

• Sanjay 16 May 2019 18:40 UTC

  8 points

  on: Non-Profit In­surance Agency

  Thank you for think­ing about how you can use your in­surance back­ground to make the world a bet­ter place, and thanks for shar­ing your thoughts.

  I have c 15ish years’ ex­pe­rience in the in­surance arena, hav­ing worked as an in­surance ac­tu­ary, fi­nan­cial (rat­ings) an­a­lyst spe­cial­is­ing in in­surance, and a strat­egy con­sul­tant for the in­surance space. I’ve also been on the board of sev­eral (>5) char­i­ties in the UK and con­sulted for ~10 more char­i­ties globally.

  I’ll give some opinions about

  • What can you do to max­imise im­pact through your work

  • Long-term busi­ness prospects for an in­surance bro­ker­age firm

  • How should you po­si­tion your firm to max­imise success

  • About struc­tur­ing as a non-profit

  First com­ment – you didn’t state your lo­ca­tion, but I’m as­sum­ing you’re in the US.

  What can you do to max­imise im­pact through your work

  • You men­tioned helping se­niors nav­i­gate med­i­care. This is no doubt a good out­come, how­ever I ex­pect that fo­cus­ing on wealth man­age­ment and en­courag­ing clients to donate more is likely to be higher im­pact, tak­ing into ac­count re­place­abil­ity. As a quick calc, as­sume you have $10mil­lion of as­sets un­der ad­minis­tra­tion (not an ag­gres­sive tar­get for an es­tab­lished ad­viser); if you can get 1% of that to be donated per an­num that oth­er­wise wouldn’t have been, that could eas­ily out­perform your dona­tions (un­less you’re par­tic­u­larly prof­itable/​fru­gal)

  • Note that fi­nan­cial ad­visers are cur­rently short on tools to help them make more effec­tive dona­tions. My or­gani­sa­tion SoGive is work­ing on this in the UK, and Agora was do­ing this in the US (al­though I think they no longer are)

  Long-term busi­ness prospects for in­surance bro­ker­age firms

  • Fi­nan­cial ad­visers in the UK and sev­eral other Euro­pean coun­tries is have of­ten (un­til a few years ago) had a fairly low-stress, mod­er­ately high-in­come life. Which sug­gests that you might be onto some­thing.

  • Some ar­gue that this is be­cause in­surance providers paid them loads of com­mis­sion, and this was only pos­si­ble be­cause com­mis­sion is not transparent

  • Sev­eral Euro­pean reg­u­la­tors, led by the UK, in­tro­duced new rules which banned com­mis­sion (UK Re­tail Distri­bu­tion Re­view 2012), in­tro­duced pe­nal new train­ing re­quire­ments, and broadly made a fi­nan­cial ad­viser’s busi­ness more reg­u­la­tion-heavy and painful. I don’t know how likely this is to hap­pen in the US, but Amer­i­can reg­u­la­tors will cer­tainly be aware of it.

  • The in­surance in­ter­me­di­ary sec­tor is also at risk from dis­in­ter­me­di­a­tion (es­pe­cially if the com­mis­sion pay­ments are made more trans­par­ent) Hav­ing said that, your com­ment about a well-run on­line plat­form sug­gests that maybe you may be in­ter­ested in ac­tu­ally *be­ing* one of the dis­rup­tors, in which case you would stand to benefit from this risk. If you are go­ing down this route, I don’t an­ti­ci­pate that it will be the easy life that some bro­kers have had.

  How should you po­si­tion your firm to max­imise success

  • For a vanilla fi­nan­cial ad­vice ser­vice, I am scep­ti­cal about the value of ad­ver­tis­ing the non-profit na­ture of your busi­ness. It risks cre­at­ing con­fu­sion about the po­si­tion­ing of your service

  • How­ever, if you pro­vided fi­nan­cial ad­vice cov­er­ing eth­i­cal in­vest­ments, struc­tur­ing your busi­ness as some kind of non-profit may have some brand value. Even then I’m doubt­ful.

  • Note that “some sort of non-profit” in­cludes op­tions which are much cheaper/​eas­ier than a full-blown 501(c)(3), see be­low for more

  • Offer­ing eth­i­cal in­vest­ment ad­vice could also (maybe) make sense from an im­pact per­spec­tive; if you ad­ver­tise your­self as offer­ing eth­i­cal in­vest­ment ad­vice, you could, as part of the ad­vice, ex­plain why donat­ing is likely to out­perform (i.e. be­cause of coun­ter­fac­tu­als).

  • If you are fo­cus­ing on pro­vid­ing in­vest­ment ad­vice, I would en­courage you to po­si­tion your­self as a “holis­tic” ad­viser or “fi­nan­cial plan­ner”, or failing that, at least a “tax spe­cial­ist”; I would en­courage you away from “in­vest­ment spe­cial­ist”. (Let me know if you would like me to ex­pand on this point; also not sure if these terms trans­fer well across the At­lantic)

  About struc­tur­ing as a non-profit

  • As men­tioned by other com­menters, it’s un­likely for you to want to struc­ture your or­gani­sa­tion as a 501(c)(3) – lots of cost/​effort and lit­tle up­side. If your dona­tions are go­ing to tax-ex­empt (501(c)(3)) or­gani­sa­tions, there’s no real tax benefit from you do­ing this

  • I haven’t checked if other com­menters have cov­ered this, but other op­tions in­clude a straight­for­ward ltd com­pany with ad­just­ments to the con­sti­tu­tion to stipu­late that the prof­its must be donated, or maybe even just a non-legally-bind­ing pledge. (I know this is pos­si­ble in the UK, I imag­ine it’s pos­si­ble in the US too). You could also be a B Corp. In the UK there is also the op­tion to be a Com­mu­nity In­ter­est Com­pany (or CIC) – I don’t know of any similar op­tion in the US (B Corp might be the clos­est thing you have to this)

  Lastly, if you’re open to more wacky ideas, I’m more pos­i­tive about micro-in­surance than earn­ing to give in the US. Your per­sonal cir­cum­stances may not al­low for this, but a few years work­ing as a bro­ker in the US, sav­ing (not donat­ing much) and then a few years sel­l­ing in­surance to the very poor (or try­ing to!) is likely to en­able you to have more im­pact than this plan, as­sum­ing you have flex­ible skills and are able to learn lots of new skills quickly. (note: I can’t promise that ev­ery­one will agree with me on this) This at­tempt may fail, how­ever it would likely teach you about what is needed to make in­surance sales work bet­ter for the bot­tom billion, which may then make you bet­ter placed to work in micro-in­surance sales for a micro-fi­nance in­sti­tu­tion or be­come an en­trepreneur.

  Fi­nally I’ll men­tion that I only check the fo­rum oc­ca­sion­ally, so apolo­gies if I for­get to look back soon and there­fore provide slow re­sponses to any more ques­tions on this.

• Sanjay 8 May 2019 10:14 UTC

  15 points

  on: Is pre­vent­ing child abuse a plau­si­ble Cause X?

  I have been on the board of one char­ity which fo­cused on child sex­ual abuse, and an­other which tack­led sex­ual abuse (not spe­cific to chil­dren). I’ll share some thoughts based on child sex­ual abuse (CSA) be­cause that’s the area I’m fa­mil­iar with (even though I ap­pre­ci­ate that the ques­tion is broader).

  The TL;DR is that the area has caused a large scale of suffer­ing; it’s hard to tackle, but I’m op­ti­mistic that there might be tractable op­tions out there.

  • Prevalence: I’ve heard peo­ple men­tion CSA prevalence rates that are dis­turbingly high (e.g. %age rates in the teens or twen­ties or even higher). I found this sur­pris­ing. There seems to be some ev­i­dence to sup­port this (e.g. https://​​www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/​​pmc/​​ar­ti­cles/​​PMC3518746/​​ ) how­ever this is not a uni­ver­sally held view (e.g. Rad­ford (L) et al 2011 give a figure of 5%, al­though even “only” 5% is hor­rible).

  • How bad is it per per­son: Through some of my other vol­un­teer­ing I have en­coun­tered many peo­ple whose lives have been made dra­mat­i­cally worse be­cause of their CSA, with se­que­lae in­clud­ing dra­mat­i­cally low­ered self-es­teem, de­liber­ate self-harm, suici­dal ideation/​in­tent and ma­jor de­pres­sive di­s­or­der. In short, there can be grave life-long con­se­quences. How­ever that’s just the peo­ple I’ve en­coun­tered; how of­ten do peo­ple sur­vive rel­a­tively un­scathed? (I know such peo­ple ex­ist)

  • Tractabil­ity: Some fac­tors will make it difficult to tackle this topic, in­clud­ing the fact that over 90% of sex­u­ally abused chil­dren were abused by some­one they knew (again from Rad­ford (L) et al 2011); this in­tro­duces com­plex fam­ily/​so­cial dy­nam­ics. Fur­ther­more, it’s hard to iden­tify those at ele­vated risk of per­pe­trat­ing CSA. Past be­havi­our is hard to use a pre­dic­tor be­cause it’s dis­turbingly easy to per­pe­trate CSA and get away with it. Also, any­where from one-fifth to two-thirds of sex­ual abuse is com­mit­ted by other chil­dren and young peo­ple (source: Hack­ett, S (2014)). Ed­u­cat­ing po­ten­tial vic­tims (i.e. ev­ery­one) may be more fruit­ful, but I haven’t looked into this.

  • Ne­glect­ed­ness: The ra­tio of (an­nual spend on is­sue by larger char­i­ties) /​ (num­ber of suffer­ers of is­sue) seems to be mid­dling for child abuse (not spe­cific to CSA); i.e. prob­a­bly higher spend (i.e. less ne­glected) than in­ter­na­tional aid but less spend (more ne­glected) than more pop­u­lar causes such as home­less­ness and vet­er­ans. Note that this is a very rough-and-ready calc

  Happy to sup­port/​ be in­volved if any­one wants to look into this further

• Sanjay 4 Apr 2019 17:39 UTC

  6 points

  in reply to: toonalfrink's comment on: $100 Prize to Best Ar­gu­ment Against Donat­ing to the EA Hotel

  I think this con­cern be­comes much less of an is­sue if the EA Ho­tel didn’t have “EA” in its name

• Sanjay 10 Mar 2019 22:14 UTC

  3 points

  on: Re­view of Ed­u­ca­tion In­ter­ven­tions and Char­i­ties in Sub-Sa­haran Africa

  I spot­ted this sen­tence: “GiveWell (2018) for in­stance does not as­sign any in­trin­sic value to ed­u­ca­tion it­self, nor to im­proved at­ten­dance or test scores.” Do you have a source for this? (As far as I’m aware, I don’t think they have ever said that.)

• Sanjay 25 Feb 2019 0:04 UTC

  −1 points

  on: Im­pact Prizes as an al­ter­na­tive to Cer­tifi­cates of Impact

  I think this idea is similar to al­ice.si (see https://​​al­ice.si/​​ or for more de­tail https://​​github.com/​​al­ice-si/​​whitepa­per/​​blob/​​mas­ter/​​Alice%20white%20pa­per%20-%20FV%200.9.pdf)

  I know the founder of al­ice.si (not very well, but we’ve met up a cou­ple of times).

  (Note that al­ice is on the blockchain and I’m not con­vinced there’s much benefit apart from the fact that some peo­ple don’t trust char­i­ties and the blockchain might help with that)

  Also, I haven’t read this very care­fully, so apolo­gies if the two ideas are not as similar as I think

• Sanjay 24 Feb 2019 23:48 UTC

  3 points

  on: Why you should NOT sup­port Aubrey de Grey’s work on age­ing. (maybe)

  I ac­ci­den­tally made this a linkpost for Aubrey de Grey’s TED talk. I then tried to undo this, but it didn’t seem to work.

Why you should NOT sup­port Aubrey de Grey’s work on age­ing. (maybe)

• Sanjay 17 Feb 2019 8:52 UTC

  17 points

  in reply to: ofer's comment on: Three Bi­ases That Made Me Believe in AI Risk

  For clar­ity, I up­voted ofer’s post, and I did it to in­di­cate that I too would like to read about these ar­gu­ments. (I sus­pect that all the other peo­ple who up­voted it did this for the same rea­son). PS this is a great post, thank you Beth!

• Sanjay 3 Feb 2019 22:32 UTC

  6 points

  on: Will com­pa­nies meet their an­i­mal welfare com­mit­ments?

  Great post! Saulius, do you think that cam­paign­ers in the rele­vant an­i­mal char­i­ties are aware of this piece?