I know someone who would be interested in looking through a list of organizations like this right now (hoping to find places to work).
William_S
If this turns out to something people find useful, it might also be useful to have people who watch the wiki and provide feedback/advice on the proposed study designs, or who can help people who are less familiar with study design and statistics to produce something useful. This provides an additional service along with the preregistration, so it isn’t just an extra onerous task. (I’d be willing to do this if it seems useful).
I’m somewhat doubtful that this experiment registry will attract a lot of use, but +1 for setting it up to try it out.
Something in developing world entrepreneurship that gives you a good position to spot opportunities for/carry out other developing world entrepreneurship.
As a consideration against, the Halo Effect might cloud judgement around odds of success for EA entrepreneurs from the point of EA investors.
As a consideration for, there may be behaviours in the founder-VC relationship that negatively impact the founders (comes up in http://paulgraham.com/fr.html), such as trying to hold off committing as long as possible. EA VCs could try to bypass these to improve odds of startup success.
While I don’t think I would actually write a whole post for this, I might have a couple quick ideas to throw in a comments section. I’d suggest explicitly asking for comments and half-formed ideas in the summary post, and see if it produces anything interesting.
I think if you want people to think about the meta-level, you would be better off with a post that says “suppose you have an argument for abortion” or “suppose you believe this simple argument X for abortion is correct” (where X is obviously a strawman, and raised as a hypothetical), and asks “what ought you do based on assuming this belief is true”. There may be a less controversial topic to use in this case.
If you want to start an object level on abortion (which, if you believe this argument is true, it seems you ought to), it might be helpful to circulate the article you want to use to start the discussion to a few EAs with varying positions on the topic before posting for feedback, because it is on a topic likely to trigger political buttons.
When considering a controversial political issue, an EA should also think about whether there are positions to take that differ from those typically presented in the mainstream media. There might be alternatives that EA reasoning opens up that people traditionally avoid because they, for example, stick to deontological reasoning and believe that either an act is right or it is wrong in all cases, and that these restrictions should be codified into law.
For the object level example raised in the article, the traditional framing is “abortion should be legal” vs. “abortion should be illegal”. Other alternatives to this might be, for example, performing other social interventions aimed at reducing the number of abortions within a framework where abortion is legal (ie. increasing social support offered to single mothers, so that fewer people choose to have an abortion).
Object level suggestion for collecting diverse opinions (for a specific person to look through, to make it easier to see trends): have something like a google form where people can report characteristics of an attempt to bring up EA ideas to a person or audience, and report comments on how the ideas were received. (This thread is a Schelling Point now, but won’t remain so in the future)
I would like to note (although I don’t quite know what to do with this information) that the proposed method of gathering feedback leaves out at least 3 billion people who don’t have internet access. In practice, it’s probably also limited to gathering information from countries/in languages with at least some EA presence already (and mainly English speaking). Now, from a “optimize spread of EA ideas” perspective, it might be reasonable to focus in wealthier countries to reach people with more leverage (ie. expected earnings), but there are reasons to pay attention to this:
1) It could be very useful to have a population of EAs with background/lived experience in developing countries, to aid in idea generation for new international development programs. 2) EA might end up not spreading very much to people living in countries like China/India, which will become more economically important in the future. 3) We might end up making a mistake on some philosophically important issue due to biases in the background of most people in the EA movement. (I don’t have a good example of what this looks like, but there might be, say, system 1 factors arising from the culture where you grow up that influence your position on issues of population ethics or something).
I also don’t know how to go about this on the object level, or whether it’s the best place for marginal EA investment right now. (I also think that EA orgs involved in international development will have access to more of these diverse perspectives, but the point I make is that they aren’t present in the meta-level discussions).
I wonder what you would get if you offered a cash prize to whoever wrote the “best” criticism of EA, according some criteria such as the opinion of a panel of specific EAs, or online voting on a forum. Obviously, this has a large potential for selection effects, but it might produce something interesting (either in the winner, or in other submissions that don’t get selected because they are too good).
I also have had negative experiences with career search stuff (more around making decisions). My suggestion, that I’m also going to try, is find someone else who you can help support you through the career search process, who you can talk over decisions with, get to look over applications, maybe help talk you through the time you spend feeling useless before applying. This could also help keep you from settling with an inferior job, if you have to justify it to someone else.
I would also suggest, from experience, to avoid committing to a job at a time when you feel really down about yourself—I’ve done that before, and it would have been better to just wait. At least try to wait a few days, talk to some people about it, etc.
(Also, there’s a facebook group for EAs to help each other with personal issues, and it’s the sort of place where you can post this stuff and get advice—messages are only visible to group members. Message me if you’re interested and not already in it, and I can add you)
What skills/experience do you think will be useful to have in 3-5 years, either in general or for EA plots?
It seems like the way to make the most money from working in tech jobs would be to find identifying startups/companies that are likely to do well in the future, work with them, and make money from the equity you get. For example, Dustin Moskovitz suggests that you can get a better return from trying to be employee #100 at the next Facebook or Dropbox than by being an entrepreneur Any thoughts on how to identify startups/companies likely to do well/be valuable to work for, or at least rule out ones likely to fail? (It seems like the problem of doing this from an investor standpoint is well investigated, and hard to do, but the employee standpoint is different).
It seems like the correct approach would be to make predictions on the future performance of a bunch of startups and track the results, in order to calibrate your predictive model, but one would need time to build up a prediction history. Short of this, there might be heuristics that are sort of helpful, ie. I’d guess that startups with more funding or more employees are more likely to succeed due to more people having confidence in them and having survived for some period of time already, but this also indicate that you are likely to get less equity.
For people who have worked in the technology sector, what form has the most useful learning come in? (ie. learning from school, learning while working on a problem independently, learning while collaborating with people, learning from reading previous work/existing codebases, etc.)?
When considering working for a startup/company with significant positive externalities, would it be far off to estimate your share of impact as (estimate of total impact of the company vs. the world where it did not exist) * (equity share of company)?
This seems easier to estimate than your impact on company as a whole, and matches up with something like the impact certificate model (equity share seems like the best estimate we would have of what impact certificate division might look like). It’s also possible that there are distortions in allocation of money that would lead to an underestimate of true impact.
On the downside, it doesn’t fully account for replaceabilty, and I’m not sure if it meshes with the assessment that “negative externalities don’t matter too much in most cases because someone else would take your job” that seems to be the typical EA position.
Another application of the Effectiveness-alone strategy might be to create an EA organization aiming to improve the effectiveness of charities by applying EA ideas (as opposed to evaluating charities to find the best ones).
I haven’t heard of anything like this. It’s the sort of thing that might feel less important than identifying/supporting top charities to most EAs. It might also require some expertise both in the area of the charity and in EA, to actually provide value. It’s the sort of thing that might be a good fit for someone with, say, a commitment to an existing organization, but with an interest in EA.
If anyone is ever at a point where they are significantly discouraged by thoughts along these lines (as I’ve been at times), there’s an Effective Altruist self-help group where you can find other EAs to talk to about how you’re feeling (and it really does help!). The group is hidden, but if you message me, I can point you in the right direction (or you can find information about it on the sidebar of the Effective Altruist facebook group).
A couple examples I’ve run across: DataWind (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DataWind), which is now at a more mature stage. Went to a talk by one of the founders recently. They made a really cheap tablet and internet services that work over 2G, which opens up the market of large sections of India currently without internet access. I think they could end up being quite successful.
A early stage example is EyeCheck (http://www.eyechecksolutions.com/), started by a couple of engineers out of undergrad. They’re developing a tool to improve diagnosis of vision problems to increase efficiency of providing glasses (think they’re starting working with NGOs running vision camps).