Venkatesh

[Question] Is the cur­rent defi­ni­tion of EA not rep­re­sen­ta­tive of hits-based giv­ing?

In­ter­pret­ing the Sys­temis­tas-Ran­domis­tas de­bate on de­vel­op­ment strategy

[Question] Would an EA have di­rected their ca­reer on fix­ing the sub­prime mort­gage crisis of ’07-’08 be­fore it hap­pened?

• Venkatesh 10 Jun 2021 17:58 UTC

  23 points

  0 ∶ 0

  in reply to: djbinder’s comment on: What com­plex­ity sci­ence and simu­la­tion have to offer effec­tive altruism

  Overall, this seems like a weak criticism worded strongly. It looks like the opposition here is more to the moniker of Complexity Science and its false claims of novelty but not actually to the study of the phenomenon that fall within the Complexity Science umbrella. This is analogous to a critique of Machine Learning that reads “ML is just a rebranding of Statistics”. Although I agree that it is not novel and there is quite a bit of vagueness in the field, I disagree on the point that Complexity Science has not made progress.

  I think the biggest utility of Complexity Science comes in breaking disciplinary silos. Rebranding things to Complexity Science, just brings all the ideas on systems from different disciplines together under one roof. If you are a student, you can learn all these phenomena in one course or degree. If you are a professor, you can work on anything that relates to Complex Systems phenomena if you are in a Complexity department. The flip side of it is, you might end up living in a world of hammers without nails—you would just have a bunch of tools without a strong domain knowledge in any of the systems that you are studying.

  My take on Complexity Science is that it is a set of tools to be used in the right context. For your specific context, some or none of the tools of Complexity Science can be useful. Where Complexity Science falls apart for me is when it tries to lose all context and generalize to all systems. I think the OP here is trying to stay within context. The post is just saying we can build ABMs to approach some specific EA cause areas. So I am more or less onboard with this post.

  On a final note, I am in agreement with your critique on abuse of Power Laws. There are too many people that just make a log-log plot, look at the line and exclaim “Power law!”. The Clauset-Shalizi-Newman paper you linked to is the citation classic here. For those who do network theory, instead of trying to prove your degree distribution is a power law, I would recommend doing Graphlet Analysis.

• Venkatesh 1 Apr 2021 10:39 UTC

  19 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: An­nounc­ing “Nam­ing What We Can”!

  May I suggest that you also name people who strongly identify with the ideas of some of these organizations? For instance, 64,620 hourists; Glomars; Dr.Phils; The InCredibles (CrediblyGood);

  Also if FHI is Bostrom’s squad then they should rename their currently boringly named “Research Areas” page to Squad Goals.

  Happy April Fools! :-)

• Venkatesh 19 May 2022 1:31 UTC

  14 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The Many Faces of Effec­tive Altruism

  I thoroughly enjoyed this! The tone of the writing matched perfectly with the idea that is being conveyed.

  If I may add a category:

  1. Desi EA—Someone not from a developed country kinda feeling out of place and totally inadequate to do anything about most mainstream EA cause areas. Mostly English-speaking educated elite from developing countries who possibly watch a lot more Hollywood than their local genres. (Also has some inability to parse slang. I honestly didn’t understand what the moniker “IDW” and “A-aesthetic” meant although I think I understood the explanation)

• Venkatesh 26 Apr 2022 5:42 UTC

  13 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Solv­ing the repli­ca­tion crisis (FTX pro­posal)

  I am really happy to see someone doing something about the replication crisis. Sorry that you didn’t get funded. I know very little about FTX or grantmaking in general and so I can’t comment on the nature of your proposal or how to make it better. But now that I see someone doing something about the replication crisis I have done an update on the Tractability of this cause area and I am excited to learn more!

  This excitement lead to some small actions from my end:

  1. I visited the Institute for Replication website and found it to be very helpful. I really appreciate the effort that went into making the Teaching tab on the website. I will try to make time in the near future (within a month or so) to go through the resources carefully.

  2. I subscribed to the BITSS YouTube Channel and skimmed through a couple of chapters of the open source textbook, Reproducible Data Science.

  3. I looked for material on the replication crisis elsewhere on this forum. I found this panel discussion from EA Global 2016 and… thats about it! Since, IMO, not enough EA material is there on this cause area, I put down a comment in the What posts do you want someone to write? in the hopes that someone wading through it for ideas will decide to write more about it.

  One thing still unclear to me—are there career opportunities here or just volunteer opportunities? In the proposal, you mentioned “reproducibility analysts at selected journals”—I had no idea that was a thing that people did! But it sounds like a very interesting role to me considering the Scale of the problem. How many people do it and is there a high demand for it? What sort of degree does someone need to do it?

  All the best with the project! I sincerely hope someone else will fund it and it will be successful.

• Venkatesh 31 Mar 2022 6:54 UTC

  12 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Un­sur­pris­ing things about the EA move­ment that sur­prised me

  For me, the big revelation was that EA was not just about causes that are supported by RCTs/​empirical evidence. It has this whole element of hits-based giving. In fact, the first time I realized this, I ended up creating a question on the forum about the misleading definition.

• Venkatesh 7 Dec 2022 16:37 UTC

  11 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Venkatesh’s Shortform

  I attended EAGx Berkeley event on Dec 2, 2022. Previously I had engaged with EA by participating & later facilitating in Intro to EA Virtual programs, writing on this forum and attending the US Policy careers speaker series. All these previous engagements were virtual. This was the first time I was in a room full of EAs! I want to thank the organizers for giving me a travel grant for this event. It would have been impossible for me to attend this event without it.

  It was a net positive experience for me. I had 4 goals in mind. 3 of them went much better than expected and 1 of them didn’t go as well. I explain my goals and how they went below. They are listed in priority:

  1. Find an internship (especially in DC)

  • When I applied to the event, this goal was Find an internship (anywhere) and it was 2nd priority. But I was getting closer to the final rounds of a fellowship program which was conditional on getting a DC internship. So, I increased priority before the conference.

  • This goal didn’t go as well as I thought it would. Many orgs I spoke to didn’t have applications open. They just asked me to fill some sort of ‘general interest form’ on their website and told me when positions might open. I guess December is not really hiring season (at least for the orgs I was interested in)

  1. Get advice on if I should stop at my Masters or go all the way to a PhD

  • When I applied to the event, this goal was originally What after Masters and it was 3rd priority. But one of my profs at uni spoke with me to consider a PhD a week before the conference. So, it changed and got higher priority before the conference.

  • I got some of the best advice on this. The 1-on-1 and office hours really helped me. Also, on day 1 of the conference Alex Lawsen spoke about An easy win for hard decisions.. So I ended up writing up a Google doc on this decision and sending it to many of the people I did 1-on-1s with. In addition, I attended a session on ‘Theory of Change’ by Michael Aird and it is going to play a huge role in how I finally make this decision.

  1. Get advice on starting a student group

  • This was actually priority 1 when I applied. But my cofounder also ended up getting selected for the event and since he could also talk about it with folks it made sense to push this down, given there were other goals that had to be prioritized as well.

  • I got good suggestions for this. My cofounder spoke with Jessica Mccurdy. I spoke with another student group organizer who got me into the ‘EA Groups’ Slack channel.

  1. Learn if there is any intersection between AI safety and policy

  • I made up this goal on day 2 of the conference given the number of AI safety events that happened. That is why it is bottom priority.

  • I learnt that the jargon here is “AI Governance”. I saw that many AI safety orgs didn’t really hire folks to do this (with notable exceptions). I hope to spend a few hours this winter break looking into this given that a few people told me that this is a fairly neglected area. If I find it really interesting, I might end up writing up something on the forum about this.

  Other thoughts:

  • Given that the FTX scandal happened recently, I was kind of worried the event would be all about that. I had read enough about it on social media and on the forum, felt bad for the people who got cheated, recognized what I can learn from it and by the time the conference rolled on I was over it. I didn’t want it to be stirred up all over again. So, I was glad to not be forced into any conversations about it. There were some events on the agenda on that topic but I was able to avoid them. So, discussions on this very important disaster did happen but it was out of the way for those who had worked through it which I really appreciated.

  • I was generally encouraged and felt optimistic seeing a bunch of people who (are atleast trying to) care about the world. Some of them were eccentric, some of them were too gloomy (IMO) about x-risks but all were kind people.

  • I personally felt that I was generally being too risk averse. Seeing people daring to try out of the ordinary stuff has helped me update a little bit more towards risk taking (of course keeping in mind to internalize risks to the max)

• Venkatesh 8 Jun 2021 17:02 UTC

  11 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: What com­plex­ity sci­ence and simu­la­tion have to offer effec­tive altruism

  Thanks a lot for posting this! I also have the same feeling as finm in that I wanted to write something like this. But even if I had written it wouldn’t have been as extensive as this one is. Wonderfully done!

  To add to the pool of resources that the post has already linked to:

  1. You can meet other people interested in Complexity Science/​Systems Thinking here: https://​​www.complexityweekend.com/​​ It is a wonderful community with a good mix of rookies and experts. So even if you are new to Complexity you should feel free to join in. I participated in their latest event and got a lot out of it (specifically on making ABMs with MESA)

  2. If you want a simple (also free!) intro to Complexity, I would recommend Introduction to the Modeling and Analysis of Complex Systems by Hiroki Sayama. If you go to the Wikipedia page on Complex System, the picture in it that portrays several subfields of Complexity was taken from this book. It should be easy to follow if you just know high school math. I have personally only read the Networks part of it (since that is the subfield of Complexity I have mostly worked on) and it was good enough to get my feet wet.

• Venkatesh 4 May 2022 18:14 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Is EA “just longter­mism” now?

  1. So EA isn’t “just longtermism,” but maybe it’s “a lot of longtermism”? And maybe it’s moving towards becoming “just longtermism”?

  EA has definitely been moving towards “a lot of longtermism”.

  The OP has already provided some evidence of this with funding data. Another thing that signals to me that this is happening is the way 80k hours has been changing their career guide. Their earlier career guide started by talking about Seligmann’s factors/​Positive Psychology and made the very simple claim that if you want a satisfying career, positive psychology says your life must involve an aspect of helping others in a meaningful way. Then one fine day they made the key ideas page and somehow now longtermism has become the “foundation” of their advice. When the EA org that is most people’s first contact with EA makes longtermism as the “foundation” of their recommendations, it should defintiely mean that EA now wants to move towards “a lot of longtermism”.

  1. What if EA was just longtermism? Would that be bad? Should EA just be longtermism?

  Yes, it would be bad if EA was just longtermism.

  I believe that striving to make the simplest and honest case for a cause area is not a choice but an intellectual obligation. It is irresponsible to put forth unnecessarily complicated ideas and chase away people who might have otherwise contributed to that cause. I think Longtermism is currently an unnecessarily complicated way for us to make the case to convince people to contribute to most of the important EA cause areas. My thoughts come from this excellent post.

  I am willing to concede my stance on this 2nd question if you can argue convincingly that:

  1. striving to make the simplest and honest case for a cause area is not an intellectual obligation we need to hold.

  2. there are some cause areas where longtermism is actually the simplest argument one can make to convince people to work on them. Of course, that would mean EA can then only work on those cause areas where this is true, but that might not be so bad if it is still highly impactful.

  Some hedging:

  I still believe Longtermism is an important idea. If you are a philosopher I would highly encourage you to work on it. But I just don’t think it is as important for EA as EA orgs are currently making it seem like. This is especially true of Strong Longterism.

  I also think that this could all be a case of nomenclature being confusing. Here is a post talking about this confusion. Maybe those who do Global health & development are also on the longtermism spectrum but are just not as ‘gaga’ about it as Strong longtermists seem to be. After all it’s not as though Expectation value bets on the future (maybe not far future) can’t be made in a Global health & development intervention! If we clarify the nomenclature here then it could be possible that “Longtermism” (or whatever else the clarified nomenclature would call it) could become a clearer & simpler explanation to convince people to contribute to a cause area. Then I would still be fine with EA becoming “Longtermism” (in the clarified nomenclature).

• Venkatesh 2 Apr 2021 7:32 UTC

  5 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: The case of the miss­ing cause pri­ori­ti­sa­tion research

  Sorry for digging up this old post. But it was mentioned in the Jan 2021 EA forum Prize report published today and that is how I got here.

  This comment assumes that Cause Prioritization (CP) is a cause area that requires people with width(worked across different cause areas) rather than depth(worked on a single cause area) of knowledge. That is, they need to know something about several cause areas instead of deeply understanding one of them. Would love to hear from CP researchers or others who would disagree.

  1. Maybe CP is an excellent path for some people in mid/​late career. I think there could be some people in the middle of their career who have width rather than depth of knowledge. I might be wrong but it feels like the current advice for mid-career folks from 80k hours (See this 80k hours podcast episode discussion for example) seems to focus on people with skill depth alone. Further, I also think 80k hours may actually be creating people who have skill width by encouraging people to experiment with working on different cause areas until they find the best personal fit. What if we could tell them—“Experimented a lot? Have a lot of width? Try CP!”

  2. I also feel like it would be difficult for people in their early career to rationalize working on CP. Personally, as someone in their early career, I feel like I don’t fully understand even one of the cause areas of interest to EAs properly. How can I then hope to understand multiples of them, find those not yet unknown and on top of it prioritize them all!? Now, there is good reason to believe EA is a relatively young movement (majority age between 25-34) and since young people can’t rationalize working on CP, we are seeing relatively lesser research on this.

  3. Maybe as EAs grow older eventually CP research will gain steam. Maybe their depth could also give them some width. At a later stage, current EAs working on a specific cause area could feel, “Having done specialized work all these years, I am beginning to see some ways I can generalize this stuff. Maybe this generalization is the next big impactful thing I can do” and then get into CP. Maybe some EAs already realized this and have even planned their career so that they can do CP at a later stage. So this whole thing could just be a matter of time. But that doesn’t mean we should not worry—what if at the stage when EAs want to generalize we don’t have the structures in place for them to pursue it?

• Venkatesh 25 Dec 2022 22:40 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Venkatesh’s Shortform

  I am pretty sure this is not worthy of a full cross post, but I think a shortform could be tolerable.

  I wrote a piece about Economic Complexity. I have seen a few posts on the forum (Like 1 and 2) about Complexity Science and I appreciate the healthy skepticism people have of it. If you are also such an appreciator, you might like my piece.

• Venkatesh 28 May 2021 17:25 UTC

  4 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Com­plex­ity and the Search for Leverage

  Thanks for this wonderful article! I absolutely agree that it would be highly beneficial to have a community that is at the intersection of EA and Complexity. I recently participated in an event, where I actually found several other EAs interested in Complexity but unfortunately I couldn’t spend enough time to network with them further (I got involved in another project there).

  I have also been thinking about how we may use the tools of Complexity to make EA better although I haven’t been able to concretely land on anything. Here are some vague thoughts I have. I am not entirely sure if any of these thoughts are worth pursuing so tug at these threads at your own peril!:

  1. I wonder if there is a possibility of creating an Agent-Based Model to understand Global Catastrophic Risks although I am not entirely sure how to go about doing this. This talk by Luisa Rodriguez here might be a good place to start. She is not building an ABM (atleast going by what she said in that talk) but the way she talks about it made me feel like an ABM could help.

  2. Complexity has some roots in Philosophy (A quick Google search took me here). I wonder how the philosophy of EA and that of Complexity would work together.

  3. I wonder if we can deal with flow-through effects better if we had a Complex Systems view. Is this a network shaped problem?

  But these are all mostly at a ‘wondering-if’ stage and one would definitely need help from cleverer people to actually start some concrete work. So having a community around EA & Complexity would be highly beneficial.

[Question] What are some re­sources to learn how Tech­nol­ogy af­fects longter­mism in Poli­cy­mak­ing?

Is there such a thing as a ‘Meta Think Tank’?

• Venkatesh 8 Jan 2023 15:07 UTC

  3 points

  1 ∶ 0

  on: Dangers of defer­ence

  If someone said “I am not going to wear masks because I am not going to defer to expert opinions on epidemiology of COVID19” how would someone taking the advice of this article respond to that?

  Overall, being a noob, I found the language in this article difficult to read. So, I am giving you a specific scenario that many people can relate to and then trying to learn what you are saying from that.

• Venkatesh 8 May 2022 13:26 UTC

  3 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: EA Fo­rum fea­ture sug­ges­tion thread

  Please let me search within my bookmarks.

  In general, I read something and bookmark it if I liked it. Then that thing that I read comes up in conversation. I go into my bookmarks to find it so that I can share it with the other person mid-convo quickly but then I can’t retrieve it from the bookmarks list as fast as I thought I could! This happens to me in almost every session as a facilitator of the EA Virtual programs!

My pre­limi­nary re­search on the Adtech marketplace

• Venkatesh 19 Apr 2022 17:18 UTC

  2 points

  0 ∶ 0

  on: Can we agree on a bet­ter name than ‘near-ter­mist’? “Not-longer­mist”? “Not-full-longter­mist”?

  Is it possible to have a name related to discount rates? Please correct me if I am wrong, but I guess all “neartermists” have a high discount rate right?

  What links here?

  • How would you draw the Venn di­a­gram of longter­mism and neart­er­mism? by Michael_Wiebe (25 May 2022 4:34 UTC; 8 points)