Scott Alexander

Effi­cient char­ity: do unto oth­ers...

• Scott Alexander 15 Oct 2014 7:41 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Open Thread 2

  Does anyone have any thoughts on whether the Ebola outbreak is a unique effective giving opportunity compared to better-studied issues like malaria and schistosomiasis? I tried to do a Fermi estimate here but I don’t trust it further than I can throw it.

• Scott Alexander 30 Oct 2014 1:50 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Should Giv­ing What We Can change its Pledge?

  I support the change. I mean, I would, as someone who’s taken advantage of the ambiguity in the current pledge to donate to x-risk-related causes, but I think even independent of that I support the change.

  The GWWC pledge is a good institution. It provides a unified community norm of “at least ten percent” and helps keep people honest. It’s a piece of “social technology” that makes effective altruism easier.

  As such, if GWWC restricted it to the developing world, I would expect and encourage the animal rights movement and the x-risk movement to get their own similar pledges so that they could benefit from the same social technology.

  But at that point, we would probably all wish there was just one pledge. Having multiple ones is unwieldy, unnecessarily fractures the movement, and creates new transaction costs—someone who took the animal rights pledge can’t shift their giving to the developing world (or vice versa) in response to new information without unpledging and repledging.

  So while acknowledging that GWWC is an organization primarily donated to the developing world, I think that mission could be consistent with it providing the pledge as a service to the broader effective altruism community, especially since its privileged position as host of the pledge gives it extra credibility and standing in the movement, which helps their own cause in the end. I think this would be in keeping with the behavior of other EA organizations who both push their own causes and try to help the movement as a whole with whatever their comparative advantage is.

• Scott Alexander 13 Jul 2018 2:20 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Open Thread #40

  Vox is looking for EA journalists. This is an opportunity to publicize EA and help shape its public perception. Their ad hints that they want people who are already in the movement, so take a look if you have any writing or journalism related skills.

• Scott Alexander 21 Apr 2019 7:53 UTC

  6 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Aaron_Nesmith-Beck’s comment on: Le­gal psychedelic re­treats launch­ing in Jamaica

  Thanks for the link to the Enthea paper, I’ll check it out.

• Scott Alexander 3 Feb 2020 19:56 UTC

  10 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Milan_Griffes’s comment on: Seek­ing Ad­vice: Arab EA

  Whether or not you go this route, you might also want to talk to Lama, a rationalist-adjacent Saudi student who was in the last Emergent Ventures cohort. She might be able to give you some advice and connect you to any existing Saudi community. You can find her at https://​​lamaalrajih.com

• Scott Alexander 25 Sep 2021 22:50 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Fight­ing Cli­mate Change with Pro­gres­sive Ac­tivism in the US: CEA

  Thanks for doing this. It’s really interesting to see someone try to quantify the effects of activism. A few questions:

  1. Can you further explain your estimate of a 0.5% − 10% higher chance of a bill passing because of climate activism?

  2. Does that number claim that the Sunrise Movement in particular increased the chance that much, or that all activism (compared to some world with no active pro-climate grassroots movement) increased it that much? If the latter, is this being divided by the Sunrise Movement’s budget, or to something else? Is the claim that the Sunrise Movement represents the majority of climate activism, so that its budget is a fair proxy for the budget of the entire cause area?

  3. Is the claim that the marginal effect increases linearly? IE if the existing Sunrise Movement increases the chance of the bill 5%, then increasing their budget by 10% would increase the chance of a bill by 5%*10% = 0.5%? If so, what’s the thought process behind this assumption?

• Scott Alexander 25 Nov 2021 7:21 UTC

  9 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: De­spite billions of ex­tra fund­ing, small donors can still have a sig­nifi­cant impact

  Thank you for writing this. I’ve seen a lot of people get confused around this, and it’s genuinely pretty confusing, and it’s good to have a really good summary all in one place by someone who knows what’s going on.

• Scott Alexander 8 Mar 2022 19:34 UTC

  61 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: We’re an­nounc­ing a $100,000 blog prize

  EA is producing a ton of thoughtful writing, but the majority takes place in internal discussions and private documents. For some discussions, this would be the only sensible way to have them. But having other discussions in public should help to raise the salience of EA in the broader discourse and bring more people in. It could also help spark new ideas.

  Any thoughts about making some of this discussion available to bloggers so they can popularize it? Asking bloggers unconnected to the EA network to reinvent or equal the level of discourse that the top people have among themselves sounds much harder than figuring out a way to get the originals to the public.

• Scott Alexander 9 Mar 2022 9:04 UTC

  38 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: MaxRa’s comment on: We’re an­nounc­ing a $100,000 blog prize

  The first two issues are the whole point of laundering your opinions through bloggers.

  I don’t mean the bloggers should post the documents publicly, or even a play-by-play of the documents (“First Will MacAskill said, then Peter Singer said...”) . I mean the bloggers should read the documents, understand the arguments, and post the key points/​conclusions, perhaps with a “thanks to some anonymous people who helped me develop these ideas”.

  I agree the last issue is important, but this could be solved by good channels of communication and explanation about what should/​shouldn’t be posted.

• Scott Alexander 11 Mar 2022 3:06 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: We’re an­nounc­ing a $100,000 blog prize

  I see the site lists “our bloggers”, including Aria Babu, Sam Enright, Stian Weslake, etc. Are these people who are on your team (and not competing for the prize), or are these people who have already entered the competition?

• Scott Alexander 11 Mar 2022 19:43 UTC

  21 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Samotsvety Nu­clear Risk Fore­casts — March 2022

  Thank you for doing this. I know many people debating this question, with some taking actions based on their conclusions, and this looks like a really good analysis.

“Long-Ter­mism” vs. “Ex­is­ten­tial Risk”

• Scott Alexander 7 Apr 2022 1:09 UTC

  50 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: HaydnBelfield’s comment on: “Long-Ter­mism” vs. “Ex­is­ten­tial Risk”

  Thanks, I had read that but failed to internalize how much it was saying this same thing. Sorry to Neel for accidentally plagiarizing him.

Im­pact Mar­kets: The An­noy­ing Details

• Scott Alexander 15 Jul 2022 6:52 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: RyanCarey’s comment on: Im­pact Mar­kets: The An­noy­ing Details

  Thanks for the link, which I had previously missed and which does contain some important considerations.

  I’ve been assuming that the people who set up the first impact market will have the opportunity to affect the “culture” around certificates, especially since many people will be learning what they are for the first time after the market starts to exist, but I agree that eventually it will depend on what buyers and sellers naturally converge to.

  One way that preference could be satisfied is to give each share a number. Funders will value the first shares most, because they are fully “counterfactual”, but if half of the value comes from a thing that the founder would have done anyway

  I don’t understand this—if you need $1 million to do the project, isn’t the one millionth one-dollar share purchased doing just as much good as the first? I think I’m missing something about the scenario you’re thinking of.

• Scott Alexander 4 Aug 2022 23:27 UTC

  22 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: ThomasW’s comment on: [Linkpost] Crit­i­cism of Crit­i­cism of Crit­i­cism, ACX

  Yes, I’m sorry, I talked to Claire about it and updated, sorry for the mixed messages and any stress this caused.

• Scott Alexander 15 Aug 2022 9:49 UTC

  20 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Pri­ori­tiz­ing x-risks may re­quire car­ing about fu­ture people

  I’m having trouble figuring out how to respond to this. I understand that it’s kind of an academic exercise to see how cause prioritization might work out if you got very very rough numbers and took utilitarianism very seriously without allowing any emotional considerations to creep in. But I feel like that potentially makes it irrelevant to any possible question.

  If we’re talking about how normal people should prioritize...well, the only near-term cause close to x-risk here is animal welfare. If you tell a normal person “You can either work to prevent you and everyone you love from dying, or work to give chickens bigger cages, which do you prefer?”, their response is not going to depend on QALYs.

  If we’re talking about how the EA movement should prioritize, the EA movement currently spends more on global health than on animal welfare and AI risk combined. It clearly isn’t even following near-termist ideas to their logical conclusion, let alone long-termist ones.

  If we’re talking about how a hypothetical perfect philosopher would prioritize, I think there would be many other things they worry about before they get to long-termism. For example, does your estimate for the badness of AI risk include that it would end all animal suffering forever? And all animal pleasure? Doesn’t that maybe flip the sign, or multiply its badness an order of magnitude? You very reasonably didn’t include that because it’s an annoying question that’s pretty far from our normal moral intuitions, but I think there are a dozen annoying questions like that, and that long-termism could be thought of as just one of that set, no more fundamental or crux-y than the others for most people.

  I’m not even sure how to think about what these numbers imply. Should the movement put 100% of money and energy into AI risk, the cause ranked most efficient here? To do that up until the point where the low-hanging fruit have been picked and something else is most effective? Are we sure we’re not already at that point, given how much trouble LTF charities report finding new things to fund? Does long-termism change this, because astronomical waste is so vast that we should be desperate for even the highest fruit? Is this just Pascal’s Wager? These all seem like questions we have to have opinions on before concluding that long-termism and near-termism have different implications.

  I find that instead of having good answers to any of these questions, my long-termism (such as it is) hinges on an idea like “I think the human race going extinct would be extra bad, even compared to many billions of deaths”. If you want to go beyond this kind of intuitive reasoning into real long-termism, I feel like you need extra work to answer the questions above that in general isn’t being done.

  What links here?

  • Open Phil Should Allo­cate Most Neart­er­mist Fund­ing to An­i­mal Welfare by Ariel Simnegar (19 Nov 2023 17:00 UTC; 489 points)

Open EA Global

• Scott Alexander 3 Sep 2022 5:40 UTC

  66 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: Eli_Nathan’s comment on: Open EA Global

  Thanks for your response. I agree that the goal should be trying to hold the conference in a way that’s best for the world and for EA’s goals. If I were to frame my argument more formally, it would be something like—suppose that you reject 1000 people per year (I have no idea if this is close to the right number). 5% get either angry or discouraged and drop out of EA. Another 5% leave EA on their own for unrelated reasons, but would have stayed if they had gone to the conference because of some good experience they had there. So my totally made up Fermi estimate is that we lose 100 people from EA each time we run a closed conference. Are the benefits of the closed conference great enough to compensate for that?

  I’m not sure, because I still don’t understand what those benefits are. I mentioned in the post that I’d be in favor of continuing to have a high admissions bar for the networking app (or maybe just sorting networkers by promise level). You write that:

  Very involved and engaged EAs might be less eager to come to EAG if the event is not particularly selective. (This is a thing we sometimes get complaints about but it’s hard for people to voice this opinion publicly, because it can sound elitist). These are precisely the kinds of people we most need to come — they are the most in-demand people that attendees want to talk to (because they can offer mentorship, job opportunities, etc.).

  I think maybe our crux is that I don’t understand this impulse, beyond the networking thing I mentioned above. Is the concern that the unpromising people will force promising people into boring conversations and take up too much of their time? That they’ll disrupt talks?

  We also have the EAGx conference series, which is more introductory and has a lower bar for admissions. If someone is excited to learn more about EA, they’d likely be better suited to an EAGx event (and they’d be more likely to get accepted, too).

  My understanding is that people also sometimes get rejected from EAGx and there is no open admission conference, is this correct?