I wonder if GiveDirectly has so good results not (just) because cash transfers are transformative but because digital payments on cellphones are.
Sinclair Chen
Karma: 146
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
Manifold had an offsite in Mexico City recently. It has good public transit, lots of plants, low cost of living, and a big expat community (which we didn’t speak to much). I strongly recommend the city.
The Cause Exploration Prize has ended, but we just released a similar tournament for ClearerThinking.org ’s regrant project. Details here: https://manifold.markets/group/clearer-thinking-regrants/about
Prediction Tournament: Who will win the Cause Exploration Prize?
A few thoughts.
I’m skeptical of using this for AI alignment. AI risk is already well funded, so if it all it took was adding more resources or hitting a metric, existing orgs could just buy that directly.
I think the economic issues of AI risk are less in its lack of legible liquid resources, and more in the difficulty of getting the AI field overall to cooperate to not race.
However, I still think pool-less quadratic funding is very exciting for donations to causes that have room for more funding (like direct charity or meta EA tooling)
I disagree with the strategic thinking section. People don’t think in terms of maximizing leverage, but in maximizing good-to-yourself per $ spent. When other people donate after you, you spend slightly more than you already did, and you get a lot more public good “for free” (paid for by other people) which makes it worth it. And to the extent people are more altruistic, they’ll generally fund these goods more rather than less.
View and Bet in Manifold prediction markets on EA Forum
The main benefit of prediction markets in posts is not on betting on the performance of particular posts, but on betting on the claims in the post. I see it more like:
Epistemic status :
- I think 60% to 70% chance of X (and click to bet over/under)
- Y odds-ratio in favor of X (and link to my bet on existing market for X)
- I’m not betting on this, but
Post Summary → testable prediction in market title
Epistemic comments vs Vibe comments → comments with bets vs without
Epistemic likes vs Vibe likes → market movement vs karma
Paid peer review for X → market subsidy
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.