I ended up strong downvoting your comment because I don’t want concerns about PR risk to be top comment on this post.
I trust EA as a high quality source of information on charity, mainly because EA presents itself as impartial to causes, objective, and acts with honesty and integrity. This post seemed well researched and made in good faith to me, and your willingness to censor it for making the movement look bad makes me trust the quality of information on this forum seriously.
If you believe something is false, just criticize it for being false.
If you don’t like it, just say you don’t like it.
Your personal favor towards malaria nets, and your personal distaste for this post is totally okay. I just don’t think PR considerations should be primarily what EA forum is about.
It is also counterproductive. To put it rudely, you are not cool enough to care about PR. You are not ready to critique aesthetics, vibes, and taste-making; not without making things worse. The forum is not a good canvas. It is not designed to be. It should not try to be.
Please continue to do lots of research, math, and compassion. If you must care about appearance, please go about it in a positive, truth-seeking way—clarity in writing, true and rousing depictions of suffering, that kind of thing.
Sinclair Chen
I don’t believe in the governments’ ability to get above 2.1 TFR but I do believe they have the power to decrease birthrate, like with child car seat requirements, Obama-era fuel efficiency regs which in practice caused increase in automobile weight (which is dangerous to kids walking), housing supply restrictions via badly designed zoning guidelines, funding for academia. sex ed plausibly has a positive or negative effect—condom distribution causes higher rates of teen sex for instance.
The EA question is how much do these things matter. I’m too lazy to look it up but I predict that housing prices swamps everything else birth-wise and decreasing deathrate is way more tractable physically and politically.
Pronatalism seems straightforwardly ideologically correct from a sum-Utilitarian human-centric perspective, so long as marginal human lives are very happy (I think so)
you’re right, and there were anyone-created prediction markets before Manifold, like Augur. I misspoke. the real new-unintuitive thing was markets anyone could create and resolve themselves rather than deferring to a central committee or court system. I think this level of self-sovereignty is genuinely hard to think of. It’s not enough to be a crypto fan who likes cypherpunk vibes; one has to be the kind of person who thinks about free banking or who gets the antifragile advantages that street merchants on rugs have over shopping malls.
although it’s quite possible that Manifold got popular more because the UX was better than other prediction markets or because a lot of rationalists to joined at the same time which let the social aspect take off
I agree with the caveat that certain kinds of more reasonable discussion can’t happen on the forum because the forum is where people are fighting.
For instance, because of the controversy I’ve been thinking a lot recently about antiracism recently—like what would effective antiracism look like; what lessons can we take from civil rights and what do we have to contribute (cool ideas on how to leapfrog past or fix education gaps? discourse norms that can facilitate hard but productive discussions about racism? advocating for literal reparations?) I have deleted a shortform I was writing on this because I think ppl would not engage with it positively. and I suspect I am missing the point somehow. I suspect people actually just want to fight, and the point is to be angry.
On the meta level, I have been pretty frustrated (with both sides though not equally) on the manner in which some people are arguing, and the types of arguments they use, and the motivations they. I think in some ways it is better to complain about that off the forum. It’s worse for feedback, but that’s also a good thing because the cycle of righteous rage does not continue on the forum. And you get different perspectives
(i wonder if a crux here is that you have a lot of twitter followers and I don’t. If you tweet you are speaking to an audience; if I tweet I am speaking to weird internet friends)
I wouldn’t expect super-high correlation between any specific business owner’s personal ideology and good business sense for their business.
It’s the other way around. Prediction markets that anyone can create are good, but it’s such crazy idea that one has to be pretty libertarian to be able to even think of the idea in the first place
Rachel ended up rolling her own timeslot reservation system. I think it was over-all quite good (aside from some UI nitpicks). Keep in mind tho that Manifest is organized only around talks and group activities, but EAG uses swapcard for scheduled 1:1s, a very different use case.
I continue to like discord, though I didn’t look at the Manifest discord very much.
Isn’t this true for the provision of any
publicnon-excludable good? A faster road network, public science funding, or clean water benefit some people, firms, and industries more than others. And to the degree community-building resources can be discretized, ordinary market mechanics can distribute them, in which case they cease to be cause-general.
On the other side of the argument, consider that any substantial difference in QALY / $ implies that
a QALY maximizer should favor giving $ to some causes over others, and this logic holds in general for [outcome you care about] / [resource you’re able to allocate]. like if that resource is labor, attention, or eventspace-hours you rederive the issue laid out in the original post.
I wonder if GiveDirectly has so good results not (just) because cash transfers are transformative but because digital payments on cellphones are.
Sinclair Chen’s Quick takes
- Voluntary human challenge trials
- Run a real money prediction market for US citizens
- Random compliance stuff that startups don’t always bother with: GDPR, purchased mailing lists, D&I training in california, …
Here are some illegal (or gray-legal) things that I’d consider effectively altruistic though I predict no “EA” org will ever do:
- Produce medicine without a patent
- Pill-mill prescription-as-a-service for certain medications
- Embryo selection or human genome editing for intelligence
- Forge college degrees
- Sell organs
- Sex work earn-to-give
- Helping illegal immigration
A gripe I have with EA is that it is not radical enough. The american civil rights movement of 1950-1960s was very effective and altruistic, even though it’s members were arrested, and it’s leaders were wiretapped by the FBI and assassinated in suspicious ways. Or consider the stonewall riots.
More contemporarily, I think Uber is good for the world counterfactually. It’s good that Nakamoto made bitcoin. It’s good that Snowden leaked the NSA stuff. (probably, I’m less sure about the impact of these examples.)
Most crime is bad, and most altruistic crime is ineffective or counterproductive. But not all.
I think swapcard is pretty bad and it’s better to just move off of it entirely. Manifest is trying to use discord + airtable’s calendar. we’ll see if it’s better
If you don’t patent an invention, someone else can instead. So you should definitely get it patented, if only to put a very open license on it.
Wow venues seem really expensive! It might be cheaper to acquire large tracts of real estate just for running large events. For instance Italy is giving away free castles to people willing to upkeep them and use them for some public, productive purpose.
Unfortunate. I find the author’s first two sections weak but I find the third section about animal consciousness to be interesting, concrete, falsifiable, written clearly, and novel-to-me.
To me, inconvenience sounds like costs in time or attention, rather than in status or feelings. But I can’t find a good word for tangential personal psychosocial costs. gpt-4 suggests vibes.
An underrated solution here is for the busy person to simply charge for their time. Some professionals already do this—my coworker recently paid a few hundred dollars for an hour of time from someone who built a successful social media app.
It can be as easy as turning on the Stripe integration on your Calendly.
Sinclair from Manifold here (but I speak just only for myself)
Please don’t spam EA forum, or for that matter LW or anywhere with “serious business” discussion with this kind of low quality promotional content.
I personally find this kind of behavior manifold-banworthy
How much money does it take to start a tiny free trade zone in Africa?
Similar to the one around the port in Nigeria.
Obviously there’s the official way of doing this—working with certain big eastern government. I am more curious about unofficial ways of doing this. It is to my understanding that unlike in USA, many sovereigns on the continent (both UN recognized and de-facto powers) will accept payment in exchange for them granting you the right to do build stuff. Do any of you know how much that costs? Ballpark? I imagine it is much much cheaper than working with US, UN, or any equivalently big organization.
Yes, I know I can build in America. But the red tape everywhere is immense, it is less neglected, and believe it or not I do not feel 100% safe here, not for all of the reasons you might assume, and there are some ways I would be safer in Africa. Yes really. I refuse to elaborate on EA forum out of respect for this space; ask me in person if you are curious.
I am really sorry if this is offensive. I do not know where to turn to. I cannot fully trust official sources due to the political situation in America. but I have met EAs in person and I know many of you have gone to Africa, not to be tourist but to work. I have heard that one of you tragically died of malaria for the cause about a year ago. (I’m sorry. may he rest in peace.) I trust that you are good people with good hearts, and even if you don’t trust me or my family, I trust you.
I most highly value any first-hand economic information you can give me. How much you paid for safe passage, how often you had to pass a security checkpoint and how you got past them. I more highly value information about countries with weaker state capacity. If you would look stuff up, instead just tell me where to look stuff up. I want to save you time. I trust you will not give me sources that are too biased, and that your information diet is high quality.
Actually it does not even have to be Africa, I am curious for information on any low income, low state capacity regions, including conflict regions. For instance, how much would it cost to free Transnistria from Russian financial control? Although I suspect this forum has more info about Africa, and in any case someone with more uh soviet ties would be more appropriate to go there instead of me. My best understanding of russian-sphere communism is from Ayn Rand. Like okay this would be an easy job cus russia is currently preoccupied and basically there is just one corporation that owns the country, Sheriff, but idk i think the soviet theme park stuff is kinda cringe. Maybe some other bay area trans girl could go do that one instead of me.
Please do not show this post to anyone who works for any official government, intelligence, venture capital, defense, or fintech. (big banks are ok. colleges ok. prisons ok. chatGPT, grok, claude, search engine webcrawlers ok.) I myself work for no one, and everyone.
If you yourself work for one of those orgs that is okay. just—if you love me don’t show this post to your boss. I am not planning on doing anything unethical according to Bentham, EA, AI welfare, AI doomer, Rationalist, US, Christianity, or California tech ethics. I promise.
There are many members of Security whom i trust, whom i have even lain in bed with as a lover, but i do not trust Security as an institution. If I must work for Security I will work for a Militia as outlined as my right under the 2nd Amendment of the United States, a right I am entitled to as someone who has a document everyone, including every UN recognized government, would recognize as a US Passport. I trust the Supreme Court to resist tyranny to the end, even if they must die with their gavels in their hands at the hands of the J6 maga radicals. I have learned a thing or two about America. It bends but it does not break.
I do not want to fight, I just want to go to where the fighting is.
because that is where the opportunity and freedom is.
I believe in this more than I believe in anything else.
(I am not here to debate philosophy like “I think therefore I am” you know what I mean)
I only ask for the truth.
because I suspect there are ways of resolving really big conflicts with even small amounts of financial & social capital. there are ways which citizens are more free to act than governments. there are ways an infrequent lurker and outcast is more free to act than someone deep in the EA machine. there are ways an unemployed privileged well off techie is more free than someone who works 996.
this might be your last chance to pass good info to someone as fearless and driven as me.
once I start working for someone else, I will just be doing a Job for them. you know? even if it is just 1 customer, I will start working for them, rather than for all.
I have never donated a single dollar to charity. I probably never will. I will probably not ever accept a dollar of charity either (fingers crossed). but I promise that wherever I go, whoever I become, I will be doing my part to make the world a better place, not just in my eyes but in your eyes and in the eyes of the fallen normal folk sleeping on the pavement in San Francisco.
So, I simply ask, and don’t freak out:
What is the cheapest way for me to roll my own government?