Thank you!
Spencer Ericson
Karma: 532
[Question] Women and non-binary EAs, are you interested in a networking group with professional advancement activities?
A Brief & Recent History of Fish: What I learned in a weekend
Thank you so much for writing this post, Joey! I was one of the people who recently emailed you about the potential impact of a “CE light.” I was hoping it would be a way to take people who didn’t have a lot of connection/money constraints on founding (would likely found soon anyway) and make them much more impactful before launch.
But looking at it through the lens of competition for mid-level funding helps me see the weaknesses in that. Why move an 80%-good charity closer to launch, when 80%-good isn’t what we need, and we would be much better served by putting more resources in a 100%-good charity?
I’m glad other people had similar questions so you could make this post! Your post, especially the CE founder pool case study, answers all the questions I had at this point about the idea.
(I see that this is old) Etsy’s product reviews for every product in the seller’s shop are all on every product page. There might be some fancy sorting bringing the more relevant reviews to the top, I’m not sure. So with a model like this, you could review one job posting, and people could see that job posting review on all the company’s other job postings.
Do you mean to say they’re “unique to” EA, or that they “feel uniquely bad in” EA?
the difference in expectations vs reality regarding micro-aggressions and sexual advances is uniquely large in EA.
Weak agree vote! I definitely expect more ethical behaviour irl from EAs than I expect from other people. But I also get the good behaviour that I expect from almost every EA that I’ve interacted with in Vancouver and briefly in SF.
It’s more distressing for me to hear reports of micro-aggressions and inappropriate sexual behaviour from people in EA than to hear similar reports in my other communities, because it’s more unpleasantly surprising and comes apart more from my expectations.
Thank you, I’m so glad it helped!
I see how both are related to honestly saying things unprompted.
One difference is whether the honesty is necessary for someone to make an important decision.
If we want to increase our transparency as a community and reduce the risk of bad actors gaining undue influence, someone needs to say “I know no one asked, but I had a concerning experience with this person.” And then some people will hopefully say, “Thanks, I was going to make a deal with this person or rely on them for something, and now I won’t.”
But if someone just came up to me and said “I like how your body looks” or something, I would probably say, “I wasn’t planning on making any decisions relating to you and my body, and I continue to not plan on doing that. Why are you telling me? Who is this supposed to benefit?”
Extremely cool! I was just saying to someone how nice it would be to have a mini degree specifically in impact analysis, with the bits of econ and stats that I would need to know… and here we are! I just started a research-y role with SoGive. I think the material from this course could be really helpful as I get started, but I won’t be able to take 11 weeks off for quite some time. I imagine the teaching and feedback is at least as useful as the reading material and assignments. Do you think you’d ever make this program available for part-time students?
Evaluating claims about ContraPest
Thank you for your support, Constance!
Yeah, it’s a hard habit to kick when you almost always write with multiple authors! It seemed like a more effective use of my time to flag it than to try to edit it all out and miss some anyway. What makes you say using “we” makes it hard to do good research?
Edit: That question might come from an incorrect interpretation. I interpreted the third sentence in your comment as a relationship like [pressure to use “we” → pressure to be formal → harder to do good research]. But you might have meant [pressure to be formal → a. pressure to use “we” b. harder to do good research]?
Anyway, I think I agree with you in that I don’t think that necessarily people should use “we” in formal writing, or that writing on the forum should be formal. This post just felt easier to write in a quasi-formal style, and I am used to writing formal pieces with multiple authors, so that’s why using “I” feels kind of forced for me. Definitely not an attempt to be ostentatious or use a “formalspeak norm.” :)
The repugnant conclusion does apply to animals, as long as you consider animals to be moral patients. (Will MacAskill does, which is illustrated in his previous book, Doing Good Better.)
If it were not possible to make humans happy on net, utilitarianism would also imply that it is worse for humanity to exist than not. But lots of people think is it possible to improve human life at scale.
Your post brings up two fundamental questions for me:
Are you a utilitarian? If you’re not, then it makes sense you wouldn’t agree with the implications of biting the bullet on the repugnant conclusion.
Is it possible to make the many wild animals of the world happy instead of suffering?
If that’s possible, it seems like we should do that. Then, the repugnant conclusion would apply—a world with many, somewhat happy animals would be better than a world with fewer, happier animals but less total utility.
If that’s not possible, then the repugnant conclusion does not apply. The goodness of the extinction of suffering animals is a different, odd implication of utilitarianism. Their extinction would probably also cause the extinction of humans (unless we cease to be animals ourselves and become digital, or we can somehow rely on a synthetic world). But given how many more wild animals there are than humans, the humans are probably morally outweighed by the animals, meaning eliminating the animals’ suffering is more morally important than preserving the happiness of the fewer humans.
Do you think we should try to make wild animals happy? How do you think we could make a plan to do that?
Is trying to change how wild animals go about their lives also steeped in colonialism? Does that make it worse than allowing wild animals to suffer?
[Question] How has the cost-effectiveness of treating tuberculosis changed?
Thresholds #1: What does good look like for longtermism?
This was a difficult post, and my first post for SoGive as the Lead Researcher & Philanthropy Advisor! I hope it can be useful to our discussions on cost-effectiveness.
I hope my uncertainty comes though. I haven’t been thinking about the size of the future for a very long time, but I learned a lot from writing this. As I mentioned at the beginning, please leave feedback on my assumptions, math, and methods, so I can write better posts about thresholds in the future.
It might be a while, but I’d like to do some writing about cost-effectiveness thresholds for animal advocacy and multipliers as well. Feel free to leave your thoughts about those as a reply to this comment as well.
Thanks Ben! I totally agree. The math in this post was trying to get at upper and lower bounds and a median—but for setting one’s personal thresholds, the nuance you mention is incredibly important. I hope this post, and the Desmos tool I linked, can help people play with these numbers and set their own thresholds!
Thanks Matt!
My estimate was just one estimate. I could have included it in the table but when I did the table it seemed like such an outlier, and done with a totally different method as well, perhaps useful for a different purpose… It might be worth adding it into the table? Not sure.
Interesting consideration! If we expect humanity to at one point technologize the LS, and extinction prevents that, don’t we still lose all those lives? It would not eradicate all life if there were aliens, but still the same amount of life in total. (I’m not endorsing any one prediction for how large the future will be.) My formulas here don’t quantify how much worse it is to lose 100% of life than 99% of life.
Sure, you could set your threshold differently depending on your purpose. I could have made this clearer!
Exactly as you say, comparing across cause areas, you might want to keep the cost you’re willing to pay for an outcome (a life) consistent.
If you’ve decided on a worldview diversification strategy that gives you separate buckets for different cause areas (e.g. by credence instead of by stakes), then you’d want to set your threshold separately for different cause areas, and use each threshold to compare within a cause area. If you set a threshold for what you’re willing to pay for a life within longtermist interventions, and fewer funding opportunities live up to that compared to the amount of money you have available, you can save some of your money in that bucket and donate it later, in the hopes that new opportunities that meet your threshold can arise. For an example of giving later based on a threshold, Open Philanthropy wants to give money each year to projects that are more cost-effective than what they will spend their “last dollar” on.
Thanks, me too!
Here is some info related to recommendations #1 and #9 about lighting. https://meaningness.com/sad-light-led-lux David Chapman has put quite a bit of research into maximizing lux per dollar. I intend to try a similar setup to him with some Jeep lights and a voltage transformer to get 40,000-60,000 lux in my room. I’m going to add a smart plug so I can use an Apple Shortcuts automation to have the lights turn on with my wake-up alarm.