SiebeRozendal

• SiebeRozendal 4 Dec 2019 14:27 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: eFish's comment on: Eight high-level un­cer­tain­ties about global catas­trophic and ex­is­ten­tial risk

  Yes, s-risks are definitely an im­por­tant con­cept there! I men­tion them only at 7. but not be­cause I thought they weren’t im­por­tant :)

• SiebeRozendal 29 Nov 2019 9:20 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: avturchin's comment on: Eight high-level un­cer­tain­ties about global catas­trophic and ex­is­ten­tial risk

  Yeah so the first point is what I’m refer­ring to by timelines. And we should all also dis­count the risk of a par­tic­u­lar haz­ard by the prob­a­bil­ity of achiev­ing in­vuln­er­a­bil­ity.

Eight high-level un­cer­tain­ties about global catas­trophic and ex­is­ten­tial risk

• SiebeRozendal 19 Nov 2019 15:49 UTC

  16 points

  in reply to: avturchin's comment on: I’m Buck Sh­legeris, I do re­search and out­reach at MIRI, AMA

  Not sure why the ini­tials are only pro­vided. For the sake of clar­ity to other read­ers, EY = Eliezer Yud­kowsky.

• SiebeRozendal 19 Nov 2019 14:13 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: Harri Besceli's comment on: EA Com­mu­nity Build­ing Grants—Re­cent Grants Made and Changes to the Ap­pli­ca­tion Pro­cess

  Thanks for the elab­o­rate re­sponse! Allow me to ask some fol­low-up ques­tions, the topic is close to my heart :)

  I ex­pect that mak­ing rel­a­tively fewer grants will leave more ca­pac­ity for try­ing things such as ex­plor­ing differ­ent mechanisms of sup­port­ing com­mu­nity builders and differ­ent types of pro­jects to fund. I ex­pect this to in­crease the com­mu­nity’s col­lec­tive un­der­stand­ing of how to do com­mu­nity build­ing more than in­creas­ing the num­ber of grants.

  Am I right to take away from this that the EA CB Grants Pro­gramme is ca­pac­ity-con­strained? Be­cause I be­lieve this would be im­por­tant for other fun­ders. I’m afraid there is a dy­namic where CB-efforts have trou­ble find­ing non-CEA fund­ing be­cause al­ter­na­tive fun­ders be­lieve CEA has got all the good op­por­tu­ni­ties cov­ered. I be­lieve we should in gen­eral be skep­ti­cal that a small set of fun­ders leads to the effi­cient al­lo­ca­tion of re­sources. The grants pro­gramme be­ing ca­pac­ity-con­strained would be ev­i­dence to­wards there be­ing im­pact­ful op­por­tu­ni­ties for other fun­ders. How does the pro­gramme ap­proach this co­or­di­na­tion with other fun­ders?

  Re­lat­edly, does CEA pre­fer to be a large part (>50%) or a smaller part of a com­mu­nity’s fund­ing? Say a com­mu­nity-build­ing effort raises ~1 FTE for 1 year among their own com­mu­nity, would this af­fect the like­li­hood of be­ing funded by CEA?

  What links here?

  • AnonymousEAForumAccount's comment on Which Com­mu­nity Build­ing Pro­jects Get Funded? by AnonymousEAForumAccount (20 Nov 2019 23:14 UTC; 14 points)

• SiebeRozendal 14 Nov 2019 17:24 UTC

  12 points

  on: Which Com­mu­nity Build­ing Pro­jects Get Funded?

  I liked this post, but I had ex­pected an­other one given the ti­tle.

  The post only de­scribes the lo­ca­tion of the pro­jects, but not so much what they are do­ing. I think it would be very valuable to see which type of pro­jects are get­ting funded. What are e.g. EA Oxford and EA Geneva do­ing that war­rants more sup­port rel­a­tive to other pro­jects?

  I have the in­tu­ition that what they are pri­mar­ily be­ing funded for is more likely to be net­work-build­ing (in­creas­ing the com­mu­nity’s con­nec­tions to in­fluen­tial peo­ple, in­clud­ing mak­ing com­mu­nity mem­bers more in­fluen­tial) than com­mu­nity-build­ing (a longer-term in­vest­ment into tight net­works that fa­cil­i­tate mu­tual sup­port). I am not sure about how fund­ing is ac­tu­ally dis­tributed be­tween these two types and what the op­ti­mal al­lo­ca­tion would be though. Without more in­for­ma­tion it’s hard to dis­cuss.

• SiebeRozendal 14 Nov 2019 16:02 UTC

  4 points

  on: EA Com­mu­nity Build­ing Grants—Re­cent Grants Made and Changes to the Ap­pli­ca­tion Pro­cess

  Hi Harri, I have two ques­tions for you.

  We think that there is a large amount of var­i­ance in the im­pact of in­di­vi­d­ual grants that we’ve made.

  What makes you be­lieve this? What kind of crite­ria are used to eval­u­ate and com­pare the im­pact of in­di­vi­d­ual grants?

  After eval­u­at­ing the grants made over the course of 2018 we also think that we now have a bet­ter un­der­stand­ing of which kinds of grant­mak­ing op­por­tu­ni­ties will be most im­pact­ful.

  Could you elab­o­rate on this? Which kinds of op­por­tu­ni­ties do you think will be most im­pact­ful? This seems highly valuable in­for­ma­tion for as­piring com­mu­nity builders.

  Fur­ther­more, com­mu­nity-build­ing seems like a long-term pro­ject, so I am quite sur­prised about the de­ci­sion to fo­cus so much on just a few op­por­tu­ni­ties and the con­fi­dence in which type of pro­jects are valuable. I would think that ex­plo­ra­tion is enor­mously valuable in such an early stage of our in­ter­na­tional com­mu­nity. Is this be­cause you be­lieve there are large po­ten­tial down­sides?

• SiebeRozendal 14 Nov 2019 15:49 UTC

  14 points

  in reply to: Kerry_Vaughan's comment on: Which Com­mu­nity Build­ing Pro­jects Get Funded?

  Yes, there are steps to miti­gate it. But com­mu­nity build­ing is by its very na­ture lo­ca­tion-con­strained. A tech firm can move to a par­tic­u­lar hub. A com­mu­nity can not.

  Fur­ther­more, if I re­call cor­rectly, the VC land­scape was as effi­cient as it could be and VC’s were over­re­li­ant on their net­works. Or­ga­ni­za­tions like Y Com­bi­na­tor stepped into that mar­ket gap by be­ing more ap­proach­able. This is a step that CB grant­mak­ers can also take.

• SiebeRozendal 23 Oct 2019 8:22 UTC

  11 points

  in reply to: RyanCarey's comment on: A sin­gle per­son de­cides about fund­ing for com­mu­nity builders world-wide

  My un­der­stand­ing is that there is a blurry line be­tween “com­mu­nity groups” and EA pro­jects in gen­eral. And there do seem to be differ­ent ap­proaches among groups.

• SiebeRozendal 22 Oct 2019 12:26 UTC

  1 point

  on: The ITN frame­work, cost-effec­tive­ness, and cause prioritisation

  The scale im­por­tance of a prob­lem is the max­i­mal point that the curve meets on the y-axis—the higher up the y-axis you can go, the bet­ter it is. Ne­glect­ed­ness tells you where you are on the x-axis at pre­sent. The other fac­tors that bear on tractabil­ity tell you the over­all shape of the curve.

  I think this is the core of de­scribing the is­sue and why we don’t need to talk about ne­glect­ed­ness as a sep­a­rate fac­tor from tractabil­ity! I have found this a use­ful and un­der­stand­able vi­sual in­ter­pre­ta­tion of the ITN-frame­work.

  One thing I worry about with the ITN-frame­work is that it seems to as­sume smooth curves: it seem to as­sume that re­turns diminish as more (ho­moge­nous) re­sources are in­vested. I think this is much more ap­pli­ca­ble to fund­ing de­ci­sions than to ca­reer de­ci­sions. Dol­lars are more eas­ily com­pa­rable than work­ers. Prob­lems need a port­fo­lio of skills. If I want to as­sess the value I could have by work­ing on a par­tic­u­lar prob­lem, I’d bet­ter ask whether I can fill a gap in that area than what the over­all tractabil­ity is of gen­eral, ho­moge­nous hu­man re­sources.

• SiebeRozendal 22 Oct 2019 11:56 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: cole_haus's comment on: Shap­ley val­ues: Bet­ter than counterfactuals

  I’d like to hear more about this if you have the time. It seems to me that it’s hard to find a non-ar­bi­trary way split­ting of play­ers.

  Say a pro­fes­sor and a stu­dent work to­gether on a pa­per. Each of them spends 30 hours on it and the pa­per would coun­ter­fac­tu­ally not have been writ­ten if ei­ther of them had not con­tributed this time. The Shap­ley val­ues should not be equiv­a­lent, be­cause the ‘rel­a­tive size’ of the play­ers’ con­tri­bu­tions shouldn’t be mea­sured by time in­put.

  Similarly, in the In­dia vac­ci­na­tion ex­am­ple, play­ers’ con­tri­bu­tion size is de­ter­mined by their money spent. But this is sen­si­tive to effi­ciency: one should not be able to get a higher Shap­ley value just from spend­ing money in­effi­ciently, right? Or should it, be­cause this worry is ad­dressed by Shap­ley cost-effec­tive­ness?

  (This is­sue seems struc­turally similar to how we should al­lo­cate cre­dence be­tween com­pet­ing hy­pothe­ses in the ab­sence of ev­i­dence. Just be­cause the two log­i­cal pos­si­bil­ities are A and ~A, does not mean a ⁵⁰⁄₅₀ cre­dence is non-abi­trary. Cf. Prin­ci­ple of In­differ­ence)

• SiebeRozendal 25 Sep 2019 8:31 UTC

  24 points

  on: My ex­pe­rience on a sum­mer re­search programme

  You have im­pres­sive out­puts Jaime!

  I would like to add that I be­lieve Sum­mer Re­search Fel­low­ships/​In­tern­ships at non-EA branded or­gani­sa­tions may be more valuable than those at EA-branded ones. I be­lieve there are some very high-qual­ity pro­grams out there, al­though I haven’t looked for them thor­oughly. Rea­sons why I be­lieve these could be bet­ter:

  • More ded­i­cated train­ing and su­per­vi­sion. EA-branded or­ga­ni­za­tions are young and of­ten run these pro­grams with­out much prior ex­pe­rience.

  • Unique net­work. There are benefits to you per­son­ally and to the EA com­mu­nity (!) of build­ing good pro­fes­sional net­works out­side of EA. Th­ese are es­pe­cially valuable if you have aca­demic am­bi­tions, be­cause EA re­search in­sti­tutes can­not cur­rently sup­port PhD’s, nor would these be as well-re­garded as one of the top in­sti­tutes in a field.

  Th­ese would be es­pe­cially benefi­cial to peo­ple who have aca­demic am­bi­tions, peo­ple who are not in the top-20% of ‘self-di­rect­ed­ness’, and to peo­ple who are rel­a­tively se­cure in their EA mo­ti­va­tion (this limits the risk of value drift).

  Draw­backs of re­search­ing at these non-EA in­sti­tutes for a sum­mer would be limited free­dom and fewer EA-minded peo­ple around. (Although it’s prob­a­bly a good op­por­tu­nity to learn to work with non-EA’s while ‘re­main­ing EA’ - a valuable and pos­si­bly rare skill!)

• SiebeRozendal 15 Sep 2019 11:59 UTC

  3 points

  in reply to: WilliamKiely's comment on: Are we liv­ing at the most in­fluen­tial time in his­tory?

  Must is a strong word, so that’s one rea­son I don’t think it’s true. What do you mean by “civ­i­liza­tion goes ex­tinct”? Be­cause

  1) There might be com­plex so­cieties be­yond Earth

  2) New com­plex so­cieties made up of in­tel­li­gent be­ings can arise even af­ter Homo Sapi­ens goes extinct

• SiebeRozendal 15 Sep 2019 11:52 UTC

  8 points

  in reply to: Robert_Wiblin's comment on: Are we liv­ing at the most in­fluen­tial time in his­tory?

  Upvote for us­ing graph­ics to elu­ci­date dis­cus­sion on the Fo­rum. Haven’t seen it of­ten and it’s very helpful!

• SiebeRozendal 15 Sep 2019 11:49 UTC

  2 points

  in reply to: Carl_Shulman's comment on: Are we liv­ing at the most in­fluen­tial time in his­tory?

  I’d like to flag that I would re­ally like to see a more el­e­gant term than ‘hingey­ness’ be­come stan­dard for refer­ring to the ease of in­fluence in differ­ent pe­ri­ods.

  Some ideas: “Lev­er­age”, “tem­po­ral lev­er­age”, “path-de­pen­dence”, “mo­ment” (in re­la­tion to the con­cept from physics), “path-crit­i­cal­ity” (mean­ing how many paths are closed off by de­ci­sions in the cur­rent time). Any­one else with ideas?

• SiebeRozendal 15 Sep 2019 11:40 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Stefan_Schubert's comment on: Are we liv­ing at the most in­fluen­tial time in his­tory?

  Ex­actly! It re­minds me a lot of the Poly­math Pro­ject in which maths prob­lems were solved col­lab­o­ra­tively. I re­ally wish EA made more use of this—I think Will’s re­cent choice to post his ideas to the Fo­rum is turn­ing out to be an ex­cel­lent choice.

• SiebeRozendal 9 Sep 2019 7:10 UTC

  1 point

  in reply to: William_MacAskill's comment on: Ask Me Any­thing!

  If any­one de­cides to work one this, please feel free to con­tact me! There is a small but non-neg­ligible prob­a­bil­ity I’ll work on this ques­tion, and if I don’t I’d be happy to help out with some con­tacts I made.

• SiebeRozendal 28 Aug 2019 10:48 UTC

  13 points

  on: Move­ment Col­lapse Scenarios

  This is a very cool ques­tion I hoped to think about more. Here’s the 5 I came up with (in a draft that I’m un­likely to finish for var­i­ous rea­sons), but with­out fur­ther ex­plo­ra­tion how they would look like:

  1. Col­lapse. The size and qual­ity of the group of peo­ple that iden­tify as com­mu­nity mem­bers re­duces by more than 50%

  2. Splin­ter­ing. Most peo­ple iden­tify them­selves as ‘[cause area/​fac­tion] first, EA sec­ond or not at all’.

  3. Plateau/​stunted growth. In­fluence and qual­ity stag­nates (i.e size and qual­ity change by −50% to +100%)

  4. Harm­less flawed re­al­iza­tion. EA be­comes in­fluen­tial with­out re­ally mak­ing a de­cid­edly pos­i­tive impact

  5. Harm­ful flawed re­al­iza­tion. EA be­comes in­fluen­tial and has a sig­nifi­cantly nega­tive im­pact.

  6. ‘Ex­tinc­tion’. No one iden­ti­fies as part of the EA com­mu­nity anymore

  I also asked Will MacAskill for “x-risks to EA”, he said:

  1. The brand or cul­ture be­comes re­garded as toxic, and that severely ham­pers long-run growth. (Think: New Athe­ism.)

  2. A PR dis­aster, esp among some of the lead­er­ship. (Think: New Athe­ism and Ele­va­tor­gate).

  3. Fiz­zle—it just ekes along, but doesn’t grow very much, loses mo­men­tum and goes out of fash­ion.

  Any­way, if you want to con­tinue with this, you could pick yours (or a com­bi­na­tion of risks with in­put from the com­mu­nity) and run a poll ask­ing peo­ple’s prob­a­bil­ity es­ti­mates for each risk.

• SiebeRozendal 28 Aug 2019 10:44 UTC

  1 point

  on: EAGxNordics 2019 Postmortem

  Hmm, I find this a sur­pris­ing re­sult, even though it seems roughly in line with the out­comes of EAGxNether­lands 2018.

  I re­ally hope EAGx con­fer­ences will con­tinue to be or­ga­nized (in Europe and el­se­where), per­haps in an im­proved form. (Fewer talks, more work­shops maybe? More coach­ing?) I am afraid these events will be can­cel­led when im­pact is i) hard to see di­rectly, and ii) heav­ily skewed. For ex­am­ple, few peo­ple made big changes af­ter EAGxNether­lands, but the seed was planted for the Hap­pier Lives In­sti­tute, which might not have formed oth­er­wise.

• SiebeRozendal 27 Aug 2019 12:53 UTC

  9 points

  in reply to: Carl_Shulman's comment on: Cur­rent Es­ti­mates for Like­li­hood of X-Risk?

  Hi Carl, is there any progress on this end in the past year? I’d be very in­ter­ested to see x-risk rele­vant fore­casts (cur­rently work­ing on a re­lated pro­ject).