tcelferact

• tcelferactAug 15, 2022, 1:52 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Shargil’s comment on: Struc­tur­ing new char­i­ties (even more) like tech star­tups

  I suspect getting more people with diverse experiences/​ideas interested in helping is a good approach. Then just let them do their thing.

  I wrote a short piece here basically trying to argue EA should do more to diversify its skillpool as others have ‘unseen data’ that could help tackle important problems: https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​MpYPCq9dW8wovYpRY/​​ea-undervalues-unseen-data .

  tl;dr: I think more people == more data && more data == better ideas.

• tcelferactAug 14, 2022, 9:50 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Lorenzo Buonanno🔸’s comment on: Struc­tur­ing new char­i­ties (even more) like tech star­tups

  Did you consider applying to Charity Entrepreneurship career coaching?

  Yep, and I might still do that, but I suspect what I have in mind isn’t a good fit for the reasons mentioned in the post.

  Curious about what resource specifically you have in mind!

  I think resources for family/​best friends/​employers of mentally ill folks is a neglected space. You have a group of people who are extremely incentivised to help (maybe employers less so), have the opportunity for a high marginal impact, but who in my experience usually have no idea what they’re doing.

  I’m also attracted to potential knock-on benefits from something like this to how mental health is discussed more generally, which I’d currently characterize as at best well-intentioned but pretty poor (and far worse than that in some areas of the world).

  Here’s something with a different focus (training a more general ‘first line of defence’ support network at a university), but that shares some features with what I have in mind: https://​​www.ox.ac.uk/​​students/​​welfare/​​peersupport .

  Thanks for the concrete company recommendations!

• tcelferactAug 13, 2022, 5:06 PM

  3 points

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  in reply to: Marshall’s comment on: Struc­tur­ing new char­i­ties (even more) like tech star­tups

  Therefore, funders need to accept a high level of initial risk and be prepared to fund for some time before the highly effective label can be achieved.

  Yep, I agree that this is the rub. There’s been a lot of chat about megaprojects recently though (e.g. https://​​forum.effectivealtruism.org/​​posts/​​ckcoSe3CS2n3BW3aT/​​), and building an ecosystem to fund high risk, high return projects of this sort could be a good candidate for that.

• tcelferactAug 11, 2022, 1:06 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Shakeel Hashim’s comment on: Why say ‘longter­mism’ and not just ‘ex­tinc­tion risk’?

  Nice, thank you for the links!

• tcelferactJul 28, 2022, 4:15 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Benjamin Start’s comment on: EA Un­der­val­ues Unseen Data

  Data doesn’t necessarily measure what’s important to measure, so you need to be smart about harnessing data that is important to the problem you’re solving. But to say that it never measures what’s important to measure is straightforwardly false. For example, to believe that you’d have to write off all of modern science as ‘unimportant’.

• tcelferactJun 23, 2022, 10:32 PM

  4 points

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  on: EA Dedicates

  Conversely, people who have work/​life balance can feel threatened by people who only care about effective altruism. If those people exist, does that mean you have to be one?

  I experience a version of this. I think I’m very unlikely to feel fulfilled working on any high-priority issue without a clear work/​life split, which makes me apprehensive of taking up a ‘seat’ that could have been taken by someone who’d have worked 80 hour weeks and vastly outperformed me.

  I also have a softer concern about fitting in at companies that are mostly made up of dedicates: this is my outside perception of the AI safety space for example. Am I really likely to gel effectively with that culture, or might my non-dedicate status mean I end up being a net-negative addition to the team?

  I guess what I’m saying is I’d l appreciate a ‘Considerations for Non-Dedicates’ section on this post!

• tcelferactMar 22, 2022, 2:58 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Bogdan Ionut Cirstea’s comment on: Ca­reer Ad­vice: Philos­o­phy + Pro­gram­ming → AI Safety

  Thanks, I’m now on their mailing list!

• tcelferactMar 22, 2022, 2:58 PM

  2 points

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  in reply to: Jay Bailey’s comment on: Ca­reer Ad­vice: Philos­o­phy + Pro­gram­ming → AI Safety

  Done, thank you!

• tcelferactMar 19, 2022, 12:32 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Ca­reer Ad­vice: Philos­o­phy + Pro­gram­ming → AI Safety

  I’m going to add some of this to my ‘done’ column, thanks for pointing it out.

• tcelferactMar 18, 2022, 9:25 PM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Yonatan Cale’s comment on: Ca­reer Ad­vice: Philos­o­phy + Pro­gram­ming → AI Safety

  Hi Yonatan, I actually got some 1:1 career advice from 80k recently, they were great! I’m also friends with someone in AI who’s local to Montréal and who’s trying to help me out. He works at MILA which has ties to a few universities in the city (that’s kind of what inspired the speculative master’s application). Thanks in advance for the referrals!

• tcelferactOct 28, 2021, 9:29 PM

  8 points

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  in reply to: SammyDMartin’s comment on: Good news on cli­mate change

  Now, I’ve always been very sceptical of these arguments because they seem to rely on nothing but intuition and go against historical precendent

  What historical precedent do you have in mind here? The reason my intuitions initially would go in the opposite direction is a case study like invasive species in Australia.

  tl;dr is when an ecosystem has evolved holding certain conditions constant (in this case geographical isolation), and that changes fairly rapidly, even a tiny change like a European rabbit can have negative consequences well beyond what was foreseen by the folks who made the change.

  I won’t pretend to be an expert on how analogous climate is to this example, but if someone wanted to shift my intuitions, a good way to start would be to convince me that, for some given optimistic economic forecast, the likelihood it has missed significant knock-on negative consequences of an X degree average rise in temperature is <50%.

• tcelferactSep 27, 2021, 11:28 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Hmash’s comment on: Philos­o­phy PhD Ap­pli­ca­tion: Ad­vice on Writ­ten Submission

  Thanks for your suggestions! Some answers:
  
  1. Robust decision making. And yes, pretty much, I was thinking of the interpretations covered here: https://​​plato.stanford.edu/​​entries/​​probability-interpret.

  2. I think formalizing this properly would be part of the task, but if we take the Impact, Neglectedness, Tractability framework, I’m roughly thinking of a decision-making framework that boosts the weight given to impact and lowers the weight given to tractability.

  3. I was roughly thinking of an analysis of the approach used by exceptional participants in forecasting tournaments like Tetlock’s. Most of them seem to be doing something Bayesian in flavor, if not strictly Bayesian updating, and with impressive results. I suspect that could have interesting implications for how we understand (the relation of subjectivity to) a Bayesian interpretation of probability.

• tcelferactSep 27, 2021, 11:18 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Linch’s comment on: Philos­o­phy PhD Ap­pli­ca­tion: Ad­vice on Writ­ten Submission

  Yes, this would also be useful, and thank you for the link!

• tcelferactSep 27, 2021, 11:17 AM

  1 point

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  in reply to: Jason Schukraft’s comment on: Philos­o­phy PhD Ap­pli­ca­tion: Ad­vice on Writ­ten Submission

  Thank you, PMed!