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Dec 12, 2021
My mistakes on the path to impact by Denise_Melchin
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: My mistakes on the path to impact, published by Denise_Melchin on the effective altruism forum.
Doing a lot of good has been a major priority in my life for several years now. Unfortunately I made some substantial mistakes which have lowered my expected impact a lot, and I am on a less promising trajectory than I would have expected a few years ago. In the hope that other people can learn from my mistakes, I thought it made sense to write them up here! I will attempt to list the mistakes which lowered my impact most over the past several years in this post and then analyse their causes. Writing this post and previous drafts has also been very personally useful to me, and I can recommend undertaking such an analysis.
Please keep in mind that my analysis of my mistakes is likely at least a bit misguided and incomprehensive.
It would have been nice to condense the post a bit more and structure it better, but having already spent a lot of time on it and wanting to move on to other projects, I thought it would be best not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good!
To put my mistakes into context, I will give a brief outline of what happened in my career-related life in the past several years before discussing what I consider to be my main mistakes.
Background
I came across the EA Community in 2012, a few months before I started university. Before that point my goal had always been to become a researcher. Until early 2017, I did a mathematics degree in Germany and received a couple of scholarships. I did a lot of ‘EA volunteering’ over the years, mostly community building and large-scale grantmaking. I also did two unpaid internships at EA orgs, one during my degree and one after graduating, in summer 2017.
After completing my summer internship, I started to try to find a role at an EA org. I applied to ~7 research and grantmaking roles in 2018. I got to the last stage 4 times, but received no offers. The closest I got was receiving a 3-month-trial offer as a Research Analyst at Open Phil, but it turned out they were unable to provide visas. In 2019, I worked as a Research Assistant for a researcher at an EA aligned university institution on a grant for a few hundred hours. I stopped as there seemed to be no route to a secure position and the role did not seem like a good fit.
In late 2019 I applied for jobs suitable for STEM graduates with no experience. I also stopped doing most of my EA volunteering. In January 2020 I began to work in an entry-level data analyst role in the UK Civil Service which I have been really happy with. In November, after 6.5mon full-time equivalent worked, I received a promotion to a more senior role with management responsibility and a significant pay rise.
First I am going to discuss what I think I did wrong from a first-order practical perspective. Afterwards I will explain which errors in my decision making process I consider the likely culprits for these mistakes - the patterns of behaviour which need to be changed to avoid similar mistakes in the future.
A lot of the following seems pretty silly to me now, and I struggle to imagine how I ever fully bought into the mistakes and systematic errors in my thinking in the first place. But here we go!
What did I get wrong?
I did not build broad career capital nor kept my options open. During my degree, I mostly focused on EA community building efforts as well as making good donation decisions. I made few attempts to build skills for the type of work I was most interested in doing (research) or skills that would be particularly useful for higher earning paths (e.g. programming), especially later on. My only internships were at EA organisations in research roles. I also stopped trying to do well in my degree later on, and stopped my previously-substantial involvement in political work.
In my firs...
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Dec 12, 2021
Growth and the case against randomista development by HaukeHillebrandt, John G. Halstead
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Growth and the case against randomista development, published by HaukeHillebrandt, John G. Halstead on the effective altruism forum.
Update, 3/8/2021: I (Hauke) gave a talk at Effective Altruism Global on this post:
Summary
Randomista development (RD) is a form of development economics which evaluates and promotes interventions that can be tested by randomised controlled trials (RCTs). It is exemplified by GiveWell (which primarily works in health) and the randomista movement in economics (which primarily works in economic development).
Here we argue for the following claims, which we believe to be quite weak:
Prominent economists make plausible arguments which suggest that research on and advocacy for economic growth in low- and middle-income countries is more cost-effective than the things funded by proponents of randomista development.
Effective altruists have devoted too little attention to these arguments.
Assessing the soundness of these arguments should be a key focus for current generation-focused effective altruists over the next few years.
We hope to start a conversation on these questions, and potentially to cause a major reorientation within EA.
We also believe the following stronger claims:
4. Improving health is not the best way to increase growth.
5. A ~4 person-year research effort will find donation opportunities working on economic growth in LMICs which are substantially better than GiveWell’s top charities from a current generation human welfare-focused point of view.
However, economic growth is not all that matters. GDP misses many crucial determinants of human welfare, including leisure time, inequality, foregone consumption from investment, public goods, social connection, life expectancy, and so on. A top priority for effective altruists should be to assess the best way to increase human welfare outside of the constraints of randomista development, i.e. allowing intervention that have not or cannot be tested by RCTs.
We proceed as follows:
We define randomista development and contrast it with research and advocacy for growth-friendly policies in low- and middle-income countries.
We show that randomista development is overrepresented in EA, and that, in contradistinction, research on and advocacy for growth-friendly economic policy (we refer to this as growth throughout) is underrepresented
We then show why some prominent economists believe that, a priori, growth is much more effective than most RD interventions.
We present a quantitative model that tries to formalize these intuitions and allows us to compare global development interventions with economic growth interventions. The model suggests that under plausible assumptions a hypothetical growth intervention can be thousands of times more cost-effective than typical RD interventions such as cash-transfers. However, when these assumptions are relaxed and compared to the very good RD interventions, growth interventions are on a similar level of effectiveness as RD interventions.
We consider various possible objections and qualifications to our argument.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to Stefan Schubert, Stephen Clare, Greg Lewis, Michael Wiebe, Sjir Hoeijmakers, Johannes Ackva, Gregory Thwaites, Will MacAskill, Aidan Goth, Sasha Cooper, and Carl Shulman for comments. Any mistakes are our own. Opinions are ours, not those of our employers.
Marinella Capriati at GiveWell commented on this piece, and the piece does not represent her views or those of GiveWell.
1. Defining Randomista Development
We define randomista development (RD) as an approach to development economics which investigates, evaluates and recommends only interventions which can be tested by randomised controlled trials (RCTs).
RD can take low-risk or more “hits-based” forms. Effective altruists have especially focused on the low-risk for...
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Dec 12, 2021
Announcing my retirement by Aaron Gertler
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Announcing my retirement, published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum.
A few sharp-eyed readers noticed my imminent departure from CEA in our last quarterly report. Gold stars all around!
My last day as our content specialist — and thus, my last day helping to run the Forum — is December 10th. The other moderators will continue to handle the basics, and we’re in the process of hiring my replacement. (Let me know if anyone comes to mind!)
Managing this place was fun. It wasn’t always fun, but — on the whole, a good time.
I’ve enjoyed giving feedback to a few hundred people, organizing some interesting AMAs, running a writing contest, building up the Digest, hosting workshops for EA groups around the world, and deleting a truly staggering number of comments advertising escort services (I’ll spare you the link).
More broadly, I’ve felt a continual sense of admiration for everyone who cares about the Forum and tries to make it better — by reading, voting, posting, crossposting, commenting, tagging, Wiki-editing, bug-reporting, and/or moderating. Collectively, you’ve put in tens of thousands of hours of work to develop our strange, complicated, unique website, with scant compensation besides karma.
(Now that I’m leaving, it’s time to be honest — despite the rumors, our karma isn’t the kind that gets you a better afterlife.)
Thank you for everything you’ve done to make this job what it was.
What’s next?
In January, I’ll join Open Philanthropy as their communications officer, working to help their researchers publish more of their work.
I’ll also be joining Effective Giving Quest as their first partnered streamer. Wish me luck: moderating this place sometimes felt like herding cats, but it’s nothing compared to Twitch chat.
My Forum comments will be less frequent, but probably spicier.
thanks for listening. to help us out with the nonlinear library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.
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Dec 12, 2021
My current impressions on career choice for longtermists by Holden Karnofsky
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: My current impressions on career choice for longtermists, published by Holden Karnofsky on the effective altruism forum.
This post summarizes the way I currently think about career choice for longtermists. I have put much less time into thinking about this than 80,000 Hours, but I think it's valuable for there to be multiple perspectives on this topic out there.
Edited to add: see below for why I chose to focus on longtermism in this post.
While the jobs I list overlap heavily with the jobs 80,000 Hours lists, I organize them and conceptualize them differently. 80,000 Hours tends to emphasize "paths" to particular roles working on particular causes; by contrast, I emphasize "aptitudes" one can build in a wide variety of roles and causes (including non-effective-altruist organizations) and then apply to a wide variety of longtermist-relevant jobs (often with options working on more than one cause). Example aptitudes include: "helping organizations achieve their objectives via good business practices," "evaluating claims against each other," "communicating already-existing ideas to not-yet-sold audiences," etc.
(Other frameworks for career choice include starting with causes (AI safety, biorisk, etc.) or heuristics ("Do work you can be great at," "Do work that builds your career capital and gives you more options.") I tend to feel people should consider multiple frameworks when making career choices, since any one framework can contain useful insight, but risks being too dogmatic and specific for individual cases.)
For each aptitude I list, I include ideas for how to explore the aptitude and tell whether one is on track. Something I like about an aptitude-based framework is that it is often relatively straightforward to get a sense of one's promise for, and progress on, a given "aptitude" if one chooses to do so. This contrasts with cause-based and path-based approaches, where there's a lot of happenstance in whether there is a job available in a given cause or on a given path, making it hard for many people to get a clear sense of their fit for their first-choice cause/path and making it hard to know what to do next. This framework won't make it easier for people to get the jobs they want, but it might make it easier for them to start learning about what sort of work is and isn't likely to be a fit.
I’ve tried to list aptitudes that seem to have relatively high potential for contributing directly to longtermist goals. I’m sure there are aptitudes I should have included and didn’t, including aptitudes that don’t seem particularly promising from a longtermist perspective now but could become more so in the future.
In many cases, developing a listed aptitude is no guarantee of being able to get a job directly focused on top longtermist goals. Longtermism is a fairly young lens on the world, and there are (at least today) a relatively small number of jobs fitting that description. However, I also believe that even if one never gets such a job, there are a lot of opportunities to contribute to top longtermist goals, using whatever job and aptitudes one does have. To flesh out this view, I lay out an "aptitude-agnostic" vision for contributing to longtermism.
Some longtermism-relevant aptitudes
"Organization building, running, and boosting" aptitudes[1]
Basic profile: helping an organization by bringing "generally useful" skills to it. By "generally useful" skills, I mean skills that could help a wide variety of organizations accomplish a wide variety of different objectives. Such skills could include:
Business operations and project management (including setting objectives, metrics, etc.)
People management and management coaching (some manager jobs require specialized skills, but some just require general management-associated skills)
Executive leadership (setting and enfo...
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Dec 12, 2021
After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation by EA applicant
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation, published by EA applicant on the effective altruism forum.
(I am writing this post under a pseudonym because I don’t want potential future non-EA employers to find this with a quick google search. Initially my name could be found on the CV linked in the text, but after this post was shared much more widely than I had expected, I got cold feet and removed it.)
In the past 12 months, I applied for 20 positions in the EA community. I didn’t get any offer. At the end of this post, I list all those positions, and how much time I spent in the application process. Before that, I write about why I think more posts like this could be useful.
Please note: The positions were all related to long-termism, EA movement building, or meta-activities (e.g. grant-making). To stress this again, I did not apply for any positions in e.g. global health or animal welfare, so what I’m going to say might not apply to these fields.
Costs of applications
Applying has considerable time-costs. Below, I estimate that I spent 7-8 weeks of full-time work in application processes alone. I guess it would be roughly twice as much if I factored in things like searching for positions, deciding which positions to apply for, or researching visa issues. (Edit: Some organisations reimburse for time spent in work tests/trials. I got paid in 4 of the 20 application processes. I might have gotten paid in more processes if I had advanced further).
At least for me, handling multiple rejections was mentally challenging. Additionally, the process may foster resentment towards the EA community. I am aware the following statement is super in-accurate and no one is literally saying that, but sometimes this is the message I felt I was getting from the EA community:
“Hey you! You know, all these ideas that you had about making the world a better place, like working for Doctors without Borders? They probably aren’t that great. The long-term future is what matters. And that is not funding constrained, so earning to give is kind of off the table as well. But the good news is, we really, really need people working on these things. We are so talent constraint. (20 applications later) . Yeah, when we said that we need people, we meant capable people. Not you. You suck.”
Why I think more posts like this would have been useful for me
Overall, I think it would have helped me to know just how competitive jobs in the EA community (long-termism, movement building, meta-stuff) are. I think I would have been more careful in selecting the positions I applied for and I would probably have started exploring other ways to have an impactful career earlier. Or maybe I would have applied to the same positions, but with less expectations and less of a feeling of being a total loser that will never contribute anything towards making the world a better place after being rejected once again 😊
Of course, I am just one example, and others will have different experiences. For example, I could imagine that it is easier to get hired by an EA organisation if you have work experience outside of research and hospitals (although many of the positions I applied for were in research or research-related).
However, I don’t think I am a very special case. I know several people who fulfil all of the following criteria:
- They studied/are studying at postgraduate level at a highly competitive university (like Oxford) or in a highly competitive subject (like medical school)
- They are within the top 5% of their course
- They have impressive extracurricular activities (like leading a local EA chapter, having organised successful big events, peer-reviewed publications while studying, .)
- They are very motivated and EA aligned
- They applied for at least 5 positi...
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Dec 12, 2021
EAF's ballot initiative doubled Zurich’s development aid by Jonas Vollmer
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: EAF"s ballot initiative doubled Zurich’s development aid, published by Jonas Vollmer on the effective altruism forum.
Summary
In 2016, the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF), then based in Switzerland, launched a ballot initiative asking to increase the city of Zurich’s development cooperation budget and to allocate it more effectively.
In 2018, we coordinated a counterproposal with the city council that preserved the main points of our original initiative and had a high chance of success.
In November 2019, the counterproposal passed with a 70% majority. Zurich’s development cooperation budget will thus increase from around $3 million to around $8 million per year. The city will aim to allocate it “based on the available scientific research on effectiveness and cost-effectiveness.” This seems to be the first time that Swiss legislation on development cooperation mentions effectiveness requirements.
The initiative cost around $25,000 in financial costs and around $190,000 in opportunity costs. Depending on the assumptions, it raised a present value of $20–160 million in development funding.
EAs should consider launching similar initiatives in other Swiss cities and around the world.
Initial proposal and signature collection
In spring 2016, the Effective Altruism Foundation (EAF), then still based in Basel, Switzerland, launched a ballot initiative asking for the city of Zurich’s development cooperation budget to be increased and to be allocated more effectively. (For information on EAF’s current focus, see this article.) We chose Zurich due to its large budget and leftist/centrist majority. I published an EA Forum post introducing the initiative and a corresponding policy paper (see English translation). (Note: In the EA Forum post, I overestimated the publicity/movement-building benefits and the probability that the original proposal would pass. I overemphasized the quantitative estimates, especially the point estimates, which don’t adequately represent the uncertainty. I underestimated the success probability of a favorable counterproposal. Also, the policy paper should have had a greater focus on hits-based, policy-oriented interventions because I think these have a chance of being even more cost-effective than more “straightforward” approaches and also tend to be viewed more favorably by professionals.)
We hired people and coordinated volunteers (mostly animal rights activists we had interacted with before) to collect the required 3,000 signatures (plus 20% safety margin) over six months to get a binding ballot vote. Signatures had to be collected in person in handwritten form. For city-level initiatives, people usually collect about 10 signatures per hour, and paying people to collect signatures costs about $3 per signature on average.
Picture: Start of signature collection on 25 May 2016.
Picture: Submission of the initiative at Zurich’s city hall on 22 November 2016.
The legislation we proposed (see the appendix) focused too strongly on Randomized Controlled Trials (RCTs) and demanded too much of a budget increase (from $3 million to $87 million per year). We made these mistakes because we had internal disagreements about the proposal and did not dedicate enough time to resolving them. This led to negative initial responses from the city council and influential charities (who thought the budget increase was too extreme, were pessimistic about the odds of success, and disliked the RCT focus), implying a <1% success probability at the ballot because public opinion tends to be heavily influenced by the city council’s official vote recommendation. At that point, we planned to retract the initiative before the vote to prevent negative PR for EA, while still aiming for a favorable counterproposal.
Counterproposal
As is common for Swiss ballot initiatives, the city d...
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Dec 12, 2021
Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people by Benjamin_Todd
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Is effective altruism growing? An update on the stock of funding vs. people, published by Benjamin_Todd on the effective altruism forum.
This is a cross-post from 80,000 Hours. See part 2 on the allocation across cause areas.
In 2015, I argued that funding for effective altruism – especially within meta and longtermist areas – had grown faster than the number of people interested in it, and that this was likely to continue. As a result, there would be a funding ‘overhang’, creating skill bottlenecks for the roles needed to deploy this funding.
A couple of years ago, I wondered if this trend was starting to reverse. There hadn’t been any new donors on the scale of Good Ventures (the main partner of Open Philanthropy), which meant that total committed funds were growing slowly, giving the number of people a chance to catch up.
However, the spectacular asset returns of the last few years and the creation of FTX, seem to have shifted the balance back towards funding. Now the funding overhang seems even larger in both proportional and absolute terms than 2015.
In the rest of this post, I make some rough guesses at total committed funds compared to the number of interested people, to see how the balance of funding vs. talent might have changed over time.
This will also serve as an update on whether effective altruism is growing – with a focus on what I think are the two most important metrics: the stock of total committed funds, and of committed people.
This analysis also made me make a small update in favour of giving now vs. investing to give later.
Here’s a summary of what’s coming up:
How much funding is committed to effective altruism (going forward)? Around $46 billion.
How quickly have these funds grown? About 37% per year since 2015, with much of the growth concentrated in 2020–2021.
How much is being donated each year? Around $420 million, which is just over 1% of committed capital, and has grown maybe about 21% per year since 2015.
How many committed community members are there? About 7,400 active members and 2,600 ‘committed’ members, growing 10–20% per year 2018–2020, and growing faster than that 2015–2017.
Has the funding overhang grown or shrunk? Funding seems to have grown faster than the number of people, so the overhang has grown in both proportional and absolute terms.
What might be the implications for career choice? Skill bottlenecks have probably increased for people able to think of ways to spend lots of funding effectively, run big projects, and evaluate grants.
To caveat, all of these figures are extremely rough, and are mainly estimated off the top of my head. I haven’t checked them with the relevant donors, so they might not endorse these estimates. However, I think they’re better than what exists currently, and thought it was important to try to give some kind of rough update on how my thinking has changed. There are likely some significant mistakes; I’d be keen to see a more thorough version of this analysis. Overall, please treat this more like notes from a podcast than a carefully researched article.
Which growth metrics matter?
Broadly, the future[1] impact of effective altruism depends on the total stock of:
The quantity of committed funds
The number of committed people (adjusted for skills and influence)
The quality of our ideas (which determine how effectively funding and labour can be turned into impact)
(In economic growth models, this would be capital, labour, and productivity.)
You could consider other resources like political capital, reputation, or public support as well, though we can also think of these as being a special type of labour.
In this post, I’m going to focus on funding and labour. (To do an equivalent analysis for ideas, which could easily matter more, we could try to estimate whether the expected return of our best way...
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Dec 12, 2021
Announcing "Naming What We Can"! by GidonKadosh, EdoArad, Davidmanheim, ShayBenMoshe, sella, Guy Raveh, Asaf Ifergan
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Announcing "Naming What We Can"!, published by GidonKadosh, EdoArad, Davidmanheim, ShayBenMoshe, sella, Guy Raveh, Asaf Ifergan on the effective altruism forum.
We hereby announce a new meta-EA institution - "Naming What We Can".
Vision
We believe in a world where every EA organization and any project has a beautifully crafted name. We believe in a world where great minds are free from the shackles of the agonizing need to name their own projects.
Goal
To name and rename every EA organization, project, thing, or person. To alleviate any suffering caused by name-selection decision paralysis
Mission
Using our superior humor and language articulation prowess, we will come up with names for stuff.
About us
We are a bunch of revolutionaries who believe in the power of correct naming. We translated over a quintillion distinct words from English to Hebrew. Some of us have read all of Unsong. One of us even read the whole bible. We spent countless fortnights debating the in and outs of our own org’s title - we Name What We Can.
What Do We Do?
We're here for the service of the EA community. Whatever you need to rename - we can name. Although we also rename whatever we can. Even if you didn't ask.
Examples
As a demonstration, we will now see some examples where NWWC has a much better name than the one currently used.
80,000 Hours => 64,620 Hours. Better fits the data and more equal toward women, two important EA virtues.
Charity Entrepreneurship => Charity Initiatives. (We don't know anyone who can spell entrepreneurship on their first try. Alternatively, own all of the variations: Charity Enterpeneurship, Charity Entreprenreurshrip, Charity Entrepenurship, Charity Entepenoorship, .)
Global Priorities Institute => Glomar Priorities Institute. We suggest including the dimension of time, making our globe a glome.
OpenPhil => Doing Right Philanthropy. Going by Dr.Phil would give a lot more clicks.
EA Israel => זולתנים יעילים בארץ הקודש
ProbablyGood => CrediblyGood. Because in EA we usually use credence rather than probability.
EA Hotel => Centre for Enabling EA Learning & Research.
Giving What We Can => Guilting Whoever We Can. Because people give more when they are feeling guilty about being rich.
Cause Prioritization => Toby Ordering.
Max Dalton => Max Delta. This represents the endless EA effort to maximize our ever-marginal utility.
Will MacAskill => will McAskill. Evidently a more common use:
Peter singer & steven pinker should be the same person, to avoid confusion.
OpenAI => ProprietaryAI. Followed by ClosedAI, UnalignedAI, MisalignedAI, and MalignantAI.
FHI => Bostrom's Squad.
GiveWell => Don'tGivePlayPumps. We feel that the message could be stronger this way.
Doing Good Better => Doing Right Right.
Electronic Arts, also known as EA, should change its name to Effective Altruism. They should also change all of their activities to Effective Altruism activities.
Impact estimation
Overall, we think the impact of the project will be net negative on expectation (see our Guesstimate model). That is because we think that the impact is likely to be somewhat positive, but there is a really small tail risk that we will cause the termination of the EA movement. However, as we are risk-averse we can mostly ignore high tails in our impact assessment so there is no need to worry.
Call to action
As a first step, we offer our services freely here on this very post! This is done to test the fit of the EA community to us. All you need to do is to comment on this post and ask us to name or rename whatever you desire.
Additionally, we hold a public recruitment process here on this very post! If you want to apply to NWWC as a member, comment on this post with a name suggestion of your choosing! Due to our current lack of diversity in our team, we particularly encourage women, people of color, ...
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Dec 12, 2021
Major UN report discusses existential risk and future generations (summary) BY finm, Avital Balwit
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Major UN report discusses existential risk and future generations (summary), published BY finm, Avital Balwit on the effective altruism forum.
Co-written with Avital Balwit.
Introduction and Key Points
On September 10th, the Secretary General of the United Nations released a report called “Our Common Agenda”. This report seems highly relevant for those working on longtermism and existential risk, and appears to signal unexpectedly strong interest from the UN. It explicitly uses longtermist language and concepts, and suggests concrete proposals for institutions to represent future generations and manage catastrophic and existential risks. In this post we've tried summarising the report for an EA audience.
Some notable features of the report:
It explicitly discusses “future generations”, “long-termism”, and “existential risk”
It highlights biorisks, nuclear weapons, advanced technologies, environmental disasters/climate change as extreme or even existential risks
It recommends the “regulation of artificial intelligence to ensure that this is aligned with shared global values”
It proposes several instruments for protecting future generations:
A Futures Lab for futures impact assessments and “regularly reporting on megatrends and catastrophic risks”
A Special Envoy for Future Generations to assist on “long-term thinking and foresight” and explore various international mechanisms for representing future generations, including...
Repurposing the Trusteeship Council to represent the interests of future generations (a major but long-inactive organ of the UN)
A Declaration on Future Generations
It proposes instruments for addressing major risks:
An Emergency Platform to convene key actors in response to complex global crises
A Strategic Foresight and Global Risk Report to be released every 5 years
It also calls for a 2023 Summit of the Future to discuss topics including these proposals addressing major risks and future generations
Other topics discussed which might be of interest:
Protecting and regulating the ‘digital commons’ and an internet-enabled ‘infodemic’
The governance of outer space
Lethal autonomous weapons
Improving pandemic response and preparedness
Developing well-being indices to complement GDP
Context
A year ago, on the 75th anniversary of the formation of the UN, member nations asked the Secretary General, António Guterres, to produce a report with recommendations to advance the agenda of the UN. This report is his response.
The report also coincides with Guterres’ re-election for his second term as Secretary General, which will begin in January 2022 and will likely last 5 years.
The report was informed by consultations, listening exercises, and input from outside experts. Toby Ord (author of The Precipice) was asked to contribute to the report as such an ‘outside expert’. Among other things he underlined that ‘future generations’ does not (just) mean ‘young people’, and that international institutions should begin to address risks even more severe than COVID-19, up to and including existential risks.
All of the new instruments and institutions described in the report are proposals made to the General Assembly of member nations. It remains to be seen how many of them will ultimately be implemented, and in what eventual form.
Summary of the Report
The report is divided into five main sections, with sections 3 and 4 being of greatest relevance from an EA or longtermist perspective. The first section situates the report in the context of the pandemic, suggesting that now is an unusually “pivotal moment” between “breakdown” and “breakthrough”. It highlights major past successes (the Montreal Protocol, the eradication of smallpox) and notes how the UN was established in the aftermath of WWII to “save succeeding generations” from war. It then calls for a “new globa...
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Dec 12, 2021
Don't Be Bycatch by AllAmericanBreakfast
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Don't Be Bycatch, published by AllAmericanBreakfast on the effective altruism forum.
It's a common story. Someone who's passionate about EA principles, but has little in the way of resources, tries and fails to do EA things. They write blog posts, and nothing happens. They apply to jobs, and nothing happens. They do research, and don't get that grant. Reading articles no longer feels exciting, but like a chore, or worse: a reminder of their own inadequacy. Anybody who comes to this place, I heartily sympathize, and encourage them to disentangle themselves from this painful situation any way they can.
Why does this happen? Well, EA has two targets.
Subscribers to EA principles who the movement wants to become big donors or effective workers.
Big donors and effective workers who the movement wants to subscribe to EA principles.
I won't claim what weight this community and its institutions give to (1) vs. (2). But when we set out to catch big fish, we risk turning the little fish into bycatch. The technical term for this is churn.
Part of the issue is the planner's fallacy. When we're setting out, we underestimate how long and costly it will be to achieve an impact, and overestimate what we'll accomplish. The higher above average you aim for, the more likely you are to fall short.
And another part is expectation-setting. If the expectation right from the get-go is that EA is about quickly achieving big impact, almost everyone will fail, and think they're just not cut out for it. I wish we had a holiday that was the opposite of Petrov Day, where we honored somebody who went a little bit out of their comfort zone to try and be helpful in a small and simple way. Or whose altruistic endeavor was passionate, costly, yet ineffective, and who tried it anyway, changed their mind, and valued it as a learning experience.
EA organizations and writers are doing us a favor by presenting a set of ideas that speak to us. They can't be responsible for addressing all our needs. That's something we need to figure out for ourselves. EA is often criticized for its "think global" approach. But the EA is our local, our global local. How do we help each other to help others?
From one little fish in the sEA to another, this is my advice:
Don't aim for instant success. Aim for 20 years of solid growth. Alice wants to maximize her chance of a 1,000% increase in her altruistic output this year. Zahara's trying to maximize her chance of a 10% increase in her altruistic output. They're likely to do very different things to achieve these goals. Don't be like Alice. Be like Zahara.
Start small, temporary, and obvious. Prefer the known, concrete, solvable problem to the quest for perfection. Yes, running an EA book club or, gosh darn it, picking up trash in the park is a fine EA project to cut our teeth on. If you donate 0% of your income, donating 1% of your income is moving in the right direction. Offer an altruistic service to one person. Interview one person to find out what their needs are.
Ask, don't tell. When entrepreneurs do market research, it's a good idea to avoid telling the customer about the idea. Instead, they should ask the customer about their needs and problems. How do they solve their problems right now? Then they can go back to the Batcave and consider whether their proposed solution would be an improvement.
Let yourself become something, just do it a little more gradually. It's good to keep your options open, but EA can be about slowing and reducing the process of commitment, increasing the ability to turn and bend. It doesn't have to be about hard stops and hairpin turns. It's OK to take a long time to make decisions and figure things out.
Build each other up. Do zoom calls. Ask each other questions. Send a message to a stranger whose blog posts you like. Form relationships, and...
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Dec 12, 2021
Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors by David_Althaus, Tobias_Baumann
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Reducing long-term risks from malevolent actors, published by David_Althaus, Tobias_Baumann on the effective altruism forum.
Summary
Dictators who exhibited highly narcissistic, psychopathic, or sadistic traits were involved in some of the greatest catastrophes in human history. (More)
Malevolent individuals in positions of power could negatively affect humanity’s long-term trajectory by, for example, exacerbating international conflict or other broad risk factors. (More)
Malevolent humans with access to advanced technology—such as whole brain emulation or other forms of transformative AI—could cause serious existential risks and suffering risks. (More)
We therefore consider interventions to reduce the expected influence of malevolent humans on the long-term future.
The development of manipulation-proof measures of malevol…
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Dec 12, 2021
Problem areas beyond 80,000 Hours' current priorities by Ardenlk
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Problem areas beyond 80,000 Hours' current priorities, published by Ardenlk on the effective altruism forum.
Why we wrote this post
At 80,000 Hours we've generally focused on finding the most pressing issues and the best ways to address them.
But even if some issue is 'the most pressing'—in the sense of being the highest impact thing for someone to work on if they could be equally successful at anything—it might easily not be the highest impact thing for many people to work on, because people have various talents, experience, and temperaments.
Moreover, the more people involved in a community, the more reason there is for them to spread out over different issues. There will eventually be diminishing returns as more people work on the same set of issues, and both the value of information and the value of capacity building fro…
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Dec 12, 2021
The case of the missing cause prioritisation research by weeatquince
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this is: The case of the missing cause prioritisation research, published by weeatquince on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction / summary
In 2011 I came across Giving What We Can, which shortly blossomed into effective altruism. Call me a geek if you like but I found it exciting, like really exciting. Here were people thinking super carefully about the most effective ways to have an impact, to create change, to build a better world. Suddenly a boundless opportunity to do vast amounts of good opened up before my eyes. I had only just got involved and by giving to fund bednets and had already magnified my impact on the world 100 times.
And this was just the beginning. Obviously bednets were not the most effective charitable intervention, they were just the most effective we had found to date – with just a tiny amount of research.…
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Dec 12, 2021
Lessons from my time in Effective Altruism by richard_ngo
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this is: Lessons from my time in Effective Altruism, published by richard_ngo on the effective altruism forum.
I’ll start with an overview of my personal story, and then try to extract more generalisable lessons. I got involved in EA around the end of 2014, when I arrived at Oxford to study Computer Science and Philosophy. I’d heard about EA a few years earlier via posts on Less Wrong, and so already considered myself EA-adjacent. I attended a few EAGx conferences, became friends with a number of EA student group organisers, and eventually steered towards a career in AI safety, starting with a masters in machine learning at Cambridge in 2017-2018.
I think it’s reasonable to say that, throughout that time, I was confidently wrong (or at least unjustifiably confident) about a lot of things. In particular:
I dismissed arguments about…
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Dec 12, 2021
EA needs consultancies by lukeprog
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: EA needs consultancies, published by lukeprog on the effective altruism forum.
Problem
EA organizations like Open Phil and CEA could do a lot more if we had access to more analysis and more talent, but for several reasons we can't bring on enough new staff to meet these needs ourselves, e.g. because our needs change over time, so we can't make a commitment that there's much future work of a particular sort to be done within our organizations.[1] This also contributes to there being far more talented EAs who want to do EA-motivated work than there are open roles at EA organizations.[2]
A partial solution?
In the public and private sectors, one common solution to this problem is consultancies. They can be think tanks like the National Academies or RAND,[3] government contractors like Booz Allen or General Dynamics, generalist cons…
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Dec 12, 2021
The Cost of Rejection by Daystar Eld
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: The Cost of Rejection, published by Daystar Eld on the effective altruism forum.
For those that don't know, I've worked as a therapist for the rationality and EA community for over two years now, first part time, then full time in early 2020. I often get asked about my observations and thoughts on what sorts of issues are particularly prevalent or unique to the community, and while any short answer to that would be oversimplifying the myriad of issues I've treated, I do feel comfortable saying that "concern with impact" is a theme that runs pretty wide and deep no matter what people come to sessions to talk about.
Seeing how this plays out in various different ways has motivated me to write on some aspects of it, starting with this broad generalization; rejection hurts. Specifically, rejection from a job that's considered high i…
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Dec 12, 2021
Concerns with ACE's Recent Behavior by Hypatia
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Concerns with ACE's Recent Behavior, published by Hypatia on the effective altruism forum.
Epistemic Status: I feel pretty confident that the core viewpoint expressed in this post is correct, though I'm less confident in some specific claims. I have not shared a draft of this post with ACE, and so it’s possible I’ve missed important context from their perspective.
EDIT: ACE board member Eric Herboso has responded with his personal take on this situation. He believes some points in this post are wrong or misleading. For example, he disputes my claim that ACE (as an organization) attempted to cancel a conference speaker.
EDIT: Jakub Stencel from Anima International has posted a response. He clarifies a few points and offers some context regarding the CARE conference situation.
Background
In the past year, there has been some c…
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Dec 12, 2021
Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization by omernevo, sella
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Introducing Probably Good: A New Career Guidance Organization, published by omernevo, sella on the effective altruism forum.
We’re excited to announce the launch of Probably Good, a new organization that provides career guidance intended to help people do as much good as possible.
Context
For a while, we have felt that there was a need for a more generalist careers organization than 80,000 Hours — one which is more agnostic regarding different cause areas and might provide a different entry point into the community to people who aren’t a good fit for 80K’s priority areas. Following 80,000 Hours’ post about what they view as gaps in the careers space, we contacted them about how a new organization could effectively fill some of those gaps.
After a few months of planning, asking questions, writing content, and interviewi…
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Dec 12, 2021
What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard by Cullen_OKeefe
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: What Makes Outreach to Progressives Hard, published by Cullen_OKeefe on the effective altruism forum.
This post summarizes some of my conclusions on things that can make EA outreach to progressives hard, as well as some tentative recommendations on techniques for making such outreach easier.
To be clear, this post does not argue or assume that outreach to progressives is harder than outreach to other political ideologies.[1] Rather, the point of this post is to highlight identifiable, recurring memes/thought patterns that cause Progressives to reject or remain skeptical of EA.
My Background (Or, Why I am Qualified to Talk About This)
Nothing in here is based on systematic empirical analysis. It should therefore be treated as highly uncertain. My analysis here draws on two sources:
Reflecting on my personal journey as someone who…
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Dec 12, 2021
Snapshot of a career choice 10 years ago by Julia_Wise
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Snapshot of a career choice 10 years ago, published by Julia_Wise on the effective altruism forum.
Here’s a little episode from EA’s history, about how much EA career advice has changed over time.
Ten years ago, I wrote an angsty LessWrong post called “Career choice for a utilitarian giver.” (“Effective altruism” and “earning to give” didn’t exist as terms at that point.)
At the time, there was a lot less funding in EA, and the emphasis was very much on donation rather than direct work. Donation was the main way I was hoping to have an impact. I was studying to become a social worker, but I had become really worried that I should try for some higher-earning career so I could donate more.
I thought becoming a psychiatrist was my best career option, since it paid significantly more than the social work career I w…
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Dec 12, 2021
Lessons from Running Stanford EA and SERI by kuhanj
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Lessons from Running Stanford EA and SERI, published by kuhanj on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction and summary
Who knew a year of work could turn a 1-organizer EA group into one of the largest EA groups in the world? Especially considering that the person spearheading this growth had little experience running much of anything relevant, and very suboptimal organization skills (It’s me, welp).
I definitely didn’t, when I started running Stanford EA in mid-2019. But I did know it was worth a shot; many universities are absolutely insane opportunities for multiplying your impact--where else can you find such dense clusters of people with the values, drive, talent, time, and career flexibility to dedicate their careers to tackling the world’s most pressing, difficult, large-scale problems?
Stanford EA had effectively…
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Dec 12, 2021
The motivated reasoning critique of effective altruism by Linch
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: The motivated reasoning critique of effective altruism, published by Linch on the effective altruism forum.
Epistemic status: Half-baked at best
I have often been skeptical of the value of a) critiques against effective altruism and b) fully general arguments that seem like they can apply to almost anything. However, as I am also a staunch defender of hypocrisy, I will now hypocritically attempt to make the case for applying a fully general critique to effective altruism.
In this post, I will claim that:
Motivated reasoning inhibits our ability to acquire knowledge and form reasoned opinions.
Selection bias in who makes which arguments significantly exacerbates the problem of motivated reasoning
Effective altruism should not be assumed to be above these biases. Moreover, there are strong reasons to believe that incentive structu…
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Dec 12, 2021
What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)? by Luisa_Rodriguez
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this is: What is the likelihood that civilizational collapse would directly lead to human extinction (within decades)?, published by Luisa_Rodriguez on the effective altruism forum.
Epistemic transparency: Confidence in conclusions varies throughout. I give rough indicators of my confidence at the section level by indicating the amount of time I spent researching/thinking about each particular subtopic, plus a qualitative description of the types of sources I rely on. In general, I consider it a first step toward understanding this threat from civilizational collapse — not a final or decisive one.
Acknowledgements
This research was funded by the Forethought Foundation. It was written by Luisa Rodriguez under the supervision of Arden Koehler and Lewis Dartnell. Thanks to Arden Koehler, Max Daniel, Michael Aird, Matthew van der Merwe, Ro…
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Dec 12, 2021
Seven things that surprised us in our first year working in policy - Lead Exposure Elimination Project by Jack, LuciaC
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Seven things that surprised us in our first year working in policy - Lead Exposure Elimination Project, published by Jack, LuciaC on the effective altruism forum.
Following the interest in our post announcing the launch of Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) eight months ago, we are now sharing an update unpacking seven findings that have surprised us in our experiences so far. We hope these will be relevant to others interested in policy change or starting a new project or charity.
For those who are not familiar with LEEP, we are a Charity Entrepreneurship-incubated NGO advocating for lead paint regulation in countries with large and growing burdens of lead poisoning from paint. The reasons we focus on reducing lead exposure are outlined in our introduction post. In short, we believe the problem to be neglected and tractab…
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Dec 12, 2021
Why I'm concerned about Giving Green By alexrjl
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Why I'm concerned about Giving Green, published by alexrjl on the effective altruism forum.
Disclosure
I am a forecaster, and occasional independent researcher. I also work in a volunteer capacity for SoGive, which has included some analysis of the climate space in order to provide advice to some individual donors interested in this area. This work has involved ~20 hours of conference calls over the last year with donors and organisations, one of which was the Clean Air Task Force, although for the last few months my primary focus has been internal work on moral weights. I began the research for this piece in a personal capacity, and the opinions below are my own, not those of SoGive.
I received input on some early drafts, for which I am extremely grateful, from Sanjay Joshi (SoGive’s founder), as well as Aaron Gertler and Lin…
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Dec 12, 2021
Good news on climate change by John G. Halstead, jackva
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Good news on climate change, published by John G. Halstead, jackvaon the effective altruism forum.
This post is about how much warming we should expect on current policy and assuming emissions stop at 2100. We argue the risk of extreme warming (>6 degrees) conditional on these assumptions now looks much lower than it once did.
Crucially, the point of this post is about the direction of an update, not an absolute assessment of risk -- indeed, the two of us disagree a fair amount on the absolute risk, but strongly agree on the direction and relative magnitude of the update.
The damage of climate change depends on three things:
How much we emit
The warming we get, conditional on emissions
The impact of a given level of warming.
The late and truly great economist Martin Weitzman argued for many years that the catastrophic risk from…
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Dec 12, 2021
Small and Vulnerable by deluks917
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this is: Small and Vulnerable, published by deluks917 on the effective altruism forum.
Anyone who is dedicating the majority of their time or money to Effective Altruism needs to ask themselves why. Why not focus on enjoying life and spending your time doing what you love most? Here is my answer:
I have a twin sister but neither of us had many other friends growing up. From second to fifth grade we had none. From sixth to eighth we had one friend. As you might guess I was bullied quite badly. Multiple teachers contributed to this. Despite having no friends my parents wanted us to be normal. They pressured me to play sports with the boys in the neighborhood. I was unable to play with an acceptable level of skill and was not invited to the games anyway. But we were still forced to go 'play outside' after school. We had to find ways to kill…
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Dec 12, 2021
Some quick notes on "effective altruism"
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this is: Some quick notes on "effective altruism", published by Jonas Vollmer on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction
I have some concerns about the "effective altruism" branding of the community.
I recently posted them as a comment, and some people encouraged me to share them as a full post instead, which I'm now doing.
I think this conversation is most likely not particularly useful or important to have right now, but there's some small chance it could be pretty valuable.
This post is based on my personal intuition and anecdotal evidence. I would put more trust in well-run surveys of the right kinds of people or other more reliable sources of evidence.
"Effective Altruism" sounds self-congratulatory and arrogant to some people:
Calling yourself an "altruist" is basically claiming moral superiority, and anecdotally, my parents and…
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Dec 12, 2021
All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild by Holden Karnofsky
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this is: All Possible Views About Humanity's Future Are Wild, published by Holden Karnofsky on the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for/
Audio version is here
Summary:
In a series of posts starting with this one, I'm going to argue that the 21st century could see our civilization develop technologies allowing rapid expansion throughout our currently-empty galaxy. And thus, that this century could determine the entire future of the galaxy for tens of billions of years, or more.
This view seems "wild": we should be doing a double take at any view that we live in such a special time. I illustrate this with a timeline of the galaxy. (On a personal level, this "wildness" is probably the single biggest reason I was skeptical for many years of the arguments presented in this series. Such claims about the significance of the times we…
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Dec 12, 2021
Some personal thoughts on EA and systemic change by CarlShulman
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this is: Some personal thoughts on EA and systemic change, published by CarlShulman on the effective altruism forum.
DavidNash requested that I repost my comment below, on what to make of discussions about EA neglecting systemic change, as a top-level post. These are my off-the-cuff thoughts and no one else's. In summary (to be unpacked below):
Actual EA is able to do assessments of systemic change interventions including electoral politics and policy change, and has done so a number of times
The great majority of critics of EA invoking systemic change fail to present the simple sort of quantitative analysis given above for the interventions they claim excel, and frequently when such analysis is done the intervention does not look competitive by EA lights
Nonetheless, my view is that historical data do show that the most efficient politi…
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Dec 12, 2021
Reality is often underpowered by Gregory_Lewis
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Reality is often underpowered, published by Gregory_Lewis on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction
When I worked as a doctor, we had a lecture by a paediatric haematologist, on a condition called Acute Lymphoblastic Leukaemia. I remember being impressed that very large proportions of patients were being offered trials randomising them between different treatment regimens, currently in clinical equipoise, to establish which had the edge. At the time, one of the areas of interest was, given the disease tended to have a good prognosis, whether one could reduce treatment intensity to reduce the long term side-effects of the treatment whilst not adversely affecting survival.
On a later rotation I worked in adult medicine, and one of the patients admitted to my team had an extremely rare cancer,[1] with a (recognised) incidence o…
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Dec 12, 2021
Big List of Cause Candidates by NunoSempere
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Big List of Cause Candidates, published by NunoSempere on the effective altruism forum.
Many thanks to Ozzie Gooen for suggesting this project, to Marta Krzeminska for editing help and to Michael Aird and others for various comments.
In the last few years, there have been many dozens of posts about potential new EA cause areas, causes and interventions. Searching for new causes seems like a worthy endeavour, but on their own, the submissions can be quite scattered and chaotic. Collecting and categorizing these cause candidates seemed like a clear next step.
We —Ozzie Gooen of the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute and I— might later be interested in expanding this work and eventually using it for forecasting —e.g., predicting whether each candidate would still seem promising after much more rigorous research. At the…
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Dec 12, 2021
Killing the ants by Joe_Carlsmith
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this is: Killing the ants, published by Joe_Carlsmith on the effective altruism forum.
(Cross-posted from Hands and Cities)
I. The ants
Recently, my housemates and I started seeing a lot of ants in the house. They marched in long lines along the edges of the basement and the bathrooms. A few showed up in the drawers. My girlfriend put out some red pepper, which was supposed to deter them from one of their routes, but they cut a line straight through.
We thought maybe they were sheltering from the rain, which had become more frequent. We had had ants before; we’d talked, then, about whether to do something about it; but we hadn’t, and eventually they disappeared. We thought maybe this would happen again.
It didn’t. Over weeks, the problem got worse. There were hundreds of ants in the upstairs bathroom. They started to show up much m…
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Dec 12, 2021
Cultured meat predictions were overly optimistic by Neil_Dullaghan
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Cultured meat predictions were overly optimistic, published by Neil_Dullaghan on the effective altruism forum.
In a 2021 MotherJones article, Sinduja Rangarajan, Tom Philpott, Allison Esperanza, and Alexis Madrigal compiled and visualized 186 publicly available predictions about timelines for cultured meat (made primarily by cultured meat companies and a handful of researchers). I added 11 additional predictions ACE had collected, and 76 other predictions I found in the course of a forthcoming Rethink Priorities project.
Check out our dataset
Of the 273 predictions collected, 84 have resolved - nine resolving correctly, and 75 resolving incorrectly. Additionally, another 40 predictions should resolve at the end of the year and look to be resolving incorrectly. Overall, the state of these predictions suggest very systematic overc…
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Dec 12, 2021
Make a $100 donation into $200 (or more) by WilliamKiely
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Make a $100 donation into $200 (or more), published by WilliamKiely on the effective altruism forum.
Latest Update: On Nov 24 at 1:01pm PT, the matching fund pool was increased to $600,000. Check the realtime dashboard to see how much is still available to allocate.
Of the first $250,000 in matching funds, more than 82% went to nonprofits you all donated to:
Donation Match Terms
This year, starting on November 1, Every.org is offering a very attractive $250,000 true counterfactual donation match. (Realtime dashboard of remaining funds.)
/@william.kiely?c=gg25
Every.org will match the first donation you make to each US 501(c)(3) nonprofit you give to 1:1 up to $100 per donor per nonprofit.
Currently, Every.org will contribute an extra $10 to your donation if you click to share your donation after donating. This might change (what…
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Dec 12, 2021
Are we living at the most influential time in history? BY WilliamKiely
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Are we living at the most influential time in history?, published BY WilliamKiely on the effective altruism forum.
Latest Update: On Nov 24 at 1:01pm PT, the matching fund pool was increased to $600,000. Check the realtime dashboard to see how much is still available to allocate.
Of the first $250,000 in matching funds, more than 82% went to nonprofits you all donated to:
Donation Match Terms
This year, starting on November 1, Every.org is offering a very attractive $250,000 true counterfactual donation match. (Realtime dashboard of remaining funds.)
/@william.kiely?c=gg25
Every.org will match the first donation you make to each US 501(c)(3) nonprofit you give to 1:1 up to $100 per donor per nonprofit.
Currently, Every.org will contribute an extra $10 to your donation if you click to share your donation after donating. This migh…
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Dec 12, 2021
2018-2019 Long-Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do? by NunoSempere
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this is: 2018-2019 Long-Term Future Fund Grantees: How did they do?, published by NunoSempere on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction
At the suggestion of Ozzie Gooen, I looked at publicly available information around past LTF grantees. We've been investigating the potential to have more evaluations of EA projects, and the LTFF grantees seemed to represent some of the best examples, as they passed a fairly high bar and were cleanly delimited.
For this project, I personally investigated each proposal without consulting many others. This work was clearly limited by not reaching out to others directly, but requesting external involvement would have increased costs significantly. We were also partially interested in finding how much we could figure out with this limitation.
Background
During its first two rounds (round 1, round 2) of t…
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Dec 12, 2021
Is EA Growing? EA Growth Metrics for 2018 by Peter Wildeford
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Is EA Growing? EA Growth Metrics for 2018, published by Peter Wildeford on the effective altruism forum.
Is EA growing? Rather than speculating from anecdotes, I decided to collect some data. This is a continuation of the analysis started last year. For each trend, I collected the raw data and also highlighted in green where the highest point was reached (though this may be different from the period with the largest growth depending on which derivative you are looking at). You can download the raw data behind these tables here.
Implications
This year, I decided to separate growth stats into a few different categories, looking at how growth changes when we talk about people learning about EA through reading; increasing their commitment through joining a newsletter, joining a Facebook group, joining the EA Forum, or subscribing to…
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Dec 12, 2021
Why I find longtermism hard, and what keeps me motivated by Michelle_Hutchinson
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Why I find longtermism hard, and what keeps me motivated, published by Michelle_Hutchinson on the effective altruism forum.
[Cross-posted from the 80,000 Hours blog]
I find working on longtermist causes to be — emotionally speaking — hard: There are so many terrible problems in the world right now. How can we turn away from the suffering happening all around us in order to prioritise something as abstract as helping make the long-run future go well?
A lot of people who aim to put longtermist ideas into practice seem to struggle with this, including many of the people I’ve worked with over the years. And I myself am no exception — the pull of suffering happening now is hard to escape. For this reason, I wanted to share a few thoughts on how I approach this challenge, and how I maintain the motivation to work on speculativ…
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Dec 12, 2021
Introducing the Legal Priorities Project by jonasschuett
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Introducing the Legal Priorities Project, published by jonasschuett on the effective altruism forum.
We’re excited to introduce a new EA organization: the Legal Priorities Project.
About us
The Legal Priorities Project is an independent, global research project founded by researchers from Harvard University. Our mission is to conduct legal research that tackles the world’s most pressing problems. This currently leads us to focus on the protection of future generations.
The project is led by Christoph Winter (ITAM/Harvard); the other founding team members are Cullen O’Keefe (OpenAI/GovAI), Eric Martínez (MIT), and Jonas Schuett (Goethe University Frankfurt). For more information about our team, visit our website.
The idea was born at the EA group at Harvard Law School in Fall 2018. Since then, we raised two rounds of fundi…
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Dec 12, 2021
Can I have impact if I’m average? by Fabienne
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this is: Can I have impact if I’m average?, published by Fabienne on the effective altruism forum.
A friend of mine who is into EA said a few days ago that he thinks most people cannot have an impact, because to have an impact you need to be among the 0.1%-1% best in your field. I have encountered this thought in quite a few people in/interested in EA, some of whom say that this thought has dragged them down a lot. When I led an EA career workshop for students who received the Studienstiftung scholarship, one of my participants who had just realised he could have a lot more impact if he switched career paths, said to me something along the lines of: “Oh man, what I have been doing was worthless”. I replied: “Ehm no it wasn’t? :) You seem to have improved lives noticeably. The fact that there are better opportunities than what y…
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Dec 12, 2021
A new strategy for broadening the appeal of effective giving (GivingMultiplier.org) by Lucius_Caviola
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: A new strategy for broadening the appeal of effective giving (GivingMultiplier.org), published by Lucius_Caviola on the effective altruism forum.
In this post, I introduce an ongoing research project with the aim of bringing effective giving to a wider range of altruists. The strategy combines 1) donation bundling (splitting between your favorite and an effective charity), 2) asymmetrical matching (offering higher matching rates for allocating more to an effective charity), 3) a form of donor coordination (to provide the matching). After conducting a series of experiments, we will test our strategy in the real-world using our new website GivingMultiplier.org. This project is a collaboration with Prof Joshua Greene and is supported by an EA Funds grant.
Background
It is difficult to motivate people to give more effectively. Prese…
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Dec 12, 2021
SHIC Will Suspend Outreach Operations by cafelow
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this is: SHIC Will Suspend Outreach Operations, published by cafelow on the effective altruism forum.
A Q1 update and 2018 in review
By Baxter Bullock and Catherine Low
Since launching in 2016, Students for High-Impact Charity (SHIC), a project of Rethink Charity, has focused on educational outreach for high school students (primarily ages 16-18) through our interactive content. In January 2018, we began implementing instructor-led workshops, mostly in the Greater Vancouver area. Below, we summarize our experiences of 2018 and explain why we are choosing to suspend our outreach operations.
Summary
2018 saw strong uptake, but difficulty securing long-term engagement - Within a year of instructor-led workshops, we presented 106 workshops, reaching 2,580 participants at 40 (mostly high school) institutions. We experienced strong student eng…
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Dec 12, 2021
Avoiding Munich's Mistakes: Advice for CEA and Local Groups by Larks
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this is: Avoiding Munich's Mistakes: Advice for CEA and Local Groups, published by Larks on the effective altruism forum.
If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.
John Stuart Mill, On Liberty, p23
We strive to base our actions on the best available evidence and reasoning about how the world works. We recognise how difficult it is to know how to do the most good, and therefore try to avoid overconfidence, to seek out informed critiques of our own views, to be open to unusual ideas, and to take alternative points of view seriously. ...
We are a community united by our commitment to these principles, not to a specific cause. Our goal is to do as much good…
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Dec 12, 2021
Thoughts on whether we're living at the most influential time in history by Buck
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this is: Thoughts on whether we're living at the most influential time in history, published by Buck on the effective altruism forum.
(thanks to Claire Zabel, Damon Binder, and Carl Shulman for suggesting some of the main arguments here, obviously all flaws are my own; thanks also to Richard Ngo, Greg Lewis, Kevin Liu, and Sidney Hough for helpful conversation and comments.)
Will MacAskill has a post, Are we living at the most influential time in history?, about what he calls the “hinge of history hypothesis” (HoH), which he defines as the claim that “we are living at the most influential time ever.” Whether HoH is true matters a lot for how longtermists should allocate their effort. In his post, Will argues that we should be pretty skeptical of HoH.
EDIT: Will recommends reading this revised article of his instead of his origina…
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Dec 12, 2021
Opinion: Digital marketing is under-utilized in EA by JSWinchell
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this is: Opinion: Digital marketing is under-utilized in EA, published by JSWinchell on the effective altruism forum.
In this post I will make the case that digital marketing is under-utilized by EA orgs as well as provide some example use cases.
My hope is that this post leads to EA orgs testing the below or similar strategies.
A large part of what Effective Altruism is trying to do is to change people’s beliefs and behaviors. Digital advertising is one tool for achieving this goal. The fact that corporations, governments, and nonprofits repeatedly invest millions of dollars in digital marketing programs is evidence of their efficacy.
A couple notes:
I work at Google/YouTube helping large advertisers run Google and YouTube Ads. For that reason this post does not touch on Facebook/Instagram//Twitter/TikTok, but I am sure there are larg…
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Dec 12, 2021
Collection of good 2012-2017 EA forum posts by saulius
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this is: Collection of good 2012-2017 EA forum posts, published by saulius on the effective altruism forum.
I feel that older EA forum posts are not read nearly as much as they should. Hence, I collected the ones that seemed to be the most useful and still relevant today. I recommend going through this list in the same way you would go through the frontpage of this forum: reading the titles and clicking on the ones that seem interesting and relevant to you. Note that you can hover over links to see more details about each post.
Also note that many of these posts have lower karma scores than most posts posted nowadays. This is in large part because until September 2018, all votes were worth only one karma point, and before September 2014 there was no karma system at all. Furthermore, the forum readership used to be lower. Hence, I don’t…
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Dec 12, 2021
Objections to Value-Alignment between Effective Altruists by CarlaZoeC
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this is: Objections to Value-Alignment between Effective Altruists, published by CarlaZoeC on the effective altruism forum.
With this post I want to encourage an examination of value-alignment between members of the EA community. I lay out reasons to believe strong value-alignment between EAs can be harmful in the long-run.
The EA mission is to bring more value into the world. This is a rather uncertain endeavour and many questions about the nature of value remain unanswered. Errors are thus unavoidable, which means the success of EA depends on having good feedback mechanisms in place to ensure mistakes can be noticed and learned from. Strong value-alignment can weaken feedback mechanisms.
EAs prefer to work with people who are value-aligned because they set out to maximse impact per resource expended. It is efficient to work with people…
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Dec 12, 2021
List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading by saulius
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this is: List of ways in which cost-effectiveness estimates can be misleading, published by saulius on the effective altruism forum.
In my cost-effectiveness estimate of corporate campaigns, I wrote a list of all the ways in which my estimate could be misleading. I thought it could be useful to have a more broadly-applicable version of that list for cost-effectiveness estimates in general. It could maybe be used as a checklist to see if no important considerations were missed when cost-effectiveness estimates are made or interpreted.
The list below is probably very incomplete. If you know of more items that should be added, please comment. I tried to optimize the list for skimming.
How cost estimates can be misleading
Costs of work of others. Suppose a charity purchases a vaccine. This causes the government to spend money distributing th…
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Dec 12, 2021
Introducing High Impact Athletes by Marcus Daniell
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this is: Introducing High Impact Athletes, published by Marcus Daniell on the effective altruism forum.
Hi all,
A while back I posted on here asking if there were any other pro athlete aspiring EAs. The response (while not including other pro athletes) was amazing, and the conversations and contacts that manifested from this forum were myriad. Thank you deeply for being such an awesome community!
Now I am very pleased to say that High Impact Athletes has launched.
We are an EA aligned non-profit run by pro athletes. HIA aims to channel donations to the most effective, evidence-based charities in the world in the areas of Global Health & Poverty and Environmental Impact. We will harness the wealth, fame, and social influence of professional athletes to bring as many new people in to the effective altruism framework as possible and create…
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Dec 12, 2021
Parenting: Things I wish I could tell my past self by Michelle_Hutchinson
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this is: Parenting: Things I wish I could tell my past self, published by Michelle_Hutchinson on the effective altruism forum.
I have a baby who’s nearly 10 months old. I’ve been thinking about what I’d like to be able to go back and tell myself before I embarked on this journey. I suspect that some of the differences between how I experienced it and what I had read in books correlates with ways that other effective altruists might also experience things. I also generally felt that finding decent no-nonsense information about parenting was hard, and that the signal to noise ratio when googling for answers was peculiarly bad. Probably the most useful advice I got was from EA friends with kids. So I thought it might be useful to jot down some thoughts for other EAs likely to have kids soon (or hoping to support others who are!).
Note…
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Dec 12, 2021
AI Governance: Opportunity and Theory of Impact by Allan Dafoe
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this is: AI Governance: Opportunity and Theory of Impact, published by Allan Dafoe on the effective altruism forum.
Note: We have recently opened up roles for researchers and a project manager at the Centre for the Governance of Artificial Intelligence, part of the Future of Humanity Institute, University of Oxford
AI governance concerns how humanity can best navigate the transition to a world with advanced AI systems.[1] It relates to how decisions are made about AI,[2] and what institutions and arrangements would help those decisions to be made well.
I believe advances in AI are likely to be among the most impactful global developments in the coming decades, and that AI governance will become among the most important global issue areas. AI governance is a new field and is relatively neglected. I’ll explain here how I think about this…
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Dec 12, 2021
What gives me hope by Michelle_Hutchinson
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: What gives me hope, published by Michelle_Hutchinson on the effective altruism forum.
Fast forward to a few months ago when I listened an interview with Peter Singer on the Lex Fridman podcast and he mentioned 80,000 Hours. Over many evenings with my new born son asleep on me on the sofa I read your key ideas pages and problem profiles and started to think about how I can change my career to maximise its long term impact.
Sometimes being an effective altruist feels really tough. There is so much suffering in the world, and no guarantee that people in the future will even get to live. There’s a lot of work to be done to try to counteract these things, and the work is usually not easy - whether you’re working a high pressure job to earn money to donate, needing to make stressful judgement calls about the ways to solve big prob…
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Dec 12, 2021
Taboo "Outside View" by kokotajlod
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this is: Taboo "Outside View", published by kokotajlod on the effective altruism forum.
No one has ever seen an AGI takeoff, so any attempt to understand it must use these outside view considerations.
[Redacted for privacy]
What? That’s exactly backwards. If we had lots of experience with past AGI takeoffs, using the outside view to predict the next one would be a lot more effective.
My reaction
Two years ago I wrote a deep-dive summary of Superforecasting and the associated scientific literature. I learned about the “Outside view” / “Inside view” distinction, and the evidence supporting it. At the time I was excited about the concept and wrote: “...I think we should do our best to imitate these best-practices, and that means using the outside view far more than we would naturally be inclined.”
Now that I have more experien…
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Dec 12, 2021
The psychology of population ethics by Lucius_Caviola
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: The psychology of population ethics, published by Lucius_Caviola on the effective altruism forum.
In a new paper, David Althaus, Andreas Mogensen, Geoffrey Goodwin, and I, investigate people's population ethical intuitions. Across nine experiments (N = 5,776), we studied how lay people judge the moral value of hypothetical human populations that differ in their size and in the quality of the individual lives that comprise them. Our investigation aimed to answer three questions:
Do people weigh happiness and suffering symmetrically?
Do people focus more on the average or total welfare of a given population?
Do people account only for currently existing lives, or also lives that could yet exist?
Here is a very brief summary of the key findings (more details can be found in the linked paper):
1. People, on average, weigh suffering…
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Dec 12, 2021
Information security careers for GCR reduction by ClaireZabel, lukeprog
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this is: Information security careers for GCR reduction, published by ClaireZabel, lukeprog on the effective altruism forum.
Update 2019-12-14: There is now a Facebook group for discussion of infosec careers in EA (including for GCR reduction); join here
This post was written by Claire Zabel and Luke Muehlhauser, based on their experiences as Open Philanthropy Project staff members working on global catastrophic risk reduction, though this post isn't intended to represent an official position of Open Phil.
Summary
In this post, we summarize why we think information security (preventing unauthorized users, such as hackers, from accessing or altering information) may be an impactful career path for some people who are focused on reducing global catastrophic risks (GCRs).
If you'd like to hear about job opportunities in information security…
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Dec 12, 2021
COVID: How did we do? How can we know? by Ghost_of_Li_Wenliang
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this is: COVID: How did we do? How can we know?, published by Ghost_of_Li_Wenliang on the effective altruism forum.
Obviously it was a triumph: the fastest vaccine development, approval, and rollout in history (by a factor of 5). We're up to 2.5bn doses in arms, out of say 12bn. And we got several good ones! Huzzah!
Obviously it was a catastrophe: through dumb inaction and a comedy of errors, we squandered the chance to suppress the virus. 4 million people are confirmed to have died of (or with) COVID - and given unbelievable underreporting that might be actually 12 million - and given Delta's momentum 20 million by the end is not unlikely. This is despite this virus being easy mode: unlike 1918, very few of the deaths were among the young frontline workers keeping the healthcare and delivery systems working; unlike SARS 1, post-viral di…
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Dec 12, 2021
Open Philanthropy is seeking proposals for outreach projects by abergal, ClaireZabel
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Open Philanthropy is seeking proposals for outreach projects, published by abergal, ClaireZabel on the effective altruism forum.
Open Philanthropy is seeking proposals from applicants interested in growing the community of people motivated to improve the long-term future via the kinds of projects described below.[1]
Apply to start a new project here; express interest in helping with a project here.
We hope to draw highly capable people to this work by supporting ambitious, scalable outreach projects that run for many years. We think a world where effective altruism, longtermism, and related ideas are routine parts of conversation in intellectual spaces is within reach, and we’re excited to support projects that work towards that world.
In this post, we describe the kinds of projects we’re interested in funding, explain why w…
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Dec 12, 2021
EffectiveAltruismData.com: A Website for Aggregating and Visualising EA Data by Hamish Huggard
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this is: EffectiveAltruismData.com: A Website for Aggregating and Visualising EA Data, published by Hamish Huggard on the effective altruism forum.
There’s lots of cool data floating around in EA: grant databases, survey results, growth metrics, etc. I’m a data scientist and enjoy data visualisation, so thought it would be a fun project to build a website which aggregates EA data into interactive plots.
The website is now live at EffectiveAltruismData.com. Source code is available on Github.
This project is still a work in progress: the data is pretty out of date and I’ve got lots of future work planned. But it’s far enough along that I’d like some public feedback.
The website is responsive and should look good on any desktop or tablet screen. If you’re viewing on a phone it will probably look ok, but you may need to alternat…
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Dec 12, 2021
What we learned from a year incubating longtermist entrepreneurship by Rebecca Kagan, Jade Leung, imben
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this is: What we learned from a year incubating longtermist entrepreneurship, published by Rebecca Kagan, Jade Leung, imben on the effective altruism forum.
This post is a retrospective on the Longtermist Entrepreneurship (LE) Project, which ran for a year and explored ways to incubate new longtermist entrepreneurship. If you’re in a hurry, we recommend reading key lessons learned, what we’d be excited about, and what it takes to work in this space.
Thanks to Markus Anderljung, Aaron Gertler, Sam Hilton, Josh Jacobson and Jonas Vollmer for reviewing, as well as many others who reviewed an earlier draft of the document. All opinions and mistakes are our own.
Intro
The Longtermist Entrepreneurship (LE) Project ran from April 2020 through May 2021, with the aim of testing ways to support the creation of new longtermist nonprofits, compa…
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Dec 12, 2021
Patient vs urgent longtermism has little direct bearing on giving now vs later by Owen_Cotton-Barratt
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this is: Patient vs urgent longtermism has little direct bearing on giving now vs later, published by Owen_Cotton-Barratt on the effective altruism forum.
This post is a response to having heard multiple people express something like "I'm persuaded by the case for patient longtermism, so I want to save money rather than give now", or otherwise implicitly assuming that patient longtermism is obviously more in favour of saving money than urgent longtermism (e.g. Ben Todd says "Even the people who are most into patient longtermism still think we should spend some on object-level things today. It’s just maybe they would only give half a percent of the portfolio as opposed to 4%." in his podcast episode on varieties of longtermism).
This view is understandable to me, especially given:
Trammell's paper arguing that "patient philanthropists"…
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Dec 12, 2021
Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations by NunoSempere
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this is: Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations, published by NunoSempere on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction
This document reviews a number of organizations in the longtermist ecosystem, and poses and answers a number of questions which would have to be answered to arrive at a numerical estimate of their impact. My aim was to see how useful a "quantified evaluation" format in the longtermist domain would be.
In the end, I did not arrive at GiveWell-style numerical estimates of the impact of each organization, which could be used to compare and rank them. To do this, one would have to resolve and quantify the remaining uncertainties for each organization, and then convert each organization's impact to a common unit [1, 2].
In the absence of fully quantified evaluations, messier kinds of reasoning have to be used and a…
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Dec 12, 2021
Thoughts on doing good through non-standard EA career pathways by Buck
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this is: Thoughts on doing good through non-standard EA career pathways, published by Buck on the effective altruism forum.
(Thanks to Beth Barnes, Asya Bergal, and especially Joshua Teperowski-Monrad for comments. A lot of the ideas in this post originated in friends of mine who didn’t want to write them up; they deserve most of the credit for good ideas, I just organized the ideas and wrote it up.)
80000 Hours writes (under the heading “Apply an unusual strength to a needed niche”):
If there’s any option in which you might excel, it’s usually worth considering, both for the potential impact and especially for the career capital; excellence in one field can often give you opportunities in others.
This is even more likely if you’re part of a community that’s coordinating or working in a small field. Communities tend to need…
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Dec 12, 2021
The most successful EA podcast of all time: Sam Harris and Will MacAskill (2020) BY Aaron Gertler
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this is: The most successful EA podcast of all time: Sam Harris and Will MacAskill (2020), published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum.
Context
My job is about helping people get involved in effective altruism, so I pay attention to how this happens.
I'm not sure I've ever seen any piece of content not named "Doing Good Better" get as much positive as Sam Harris's two podcast episodes with Will MacAskill.
After the first episode, Sam was deeply affected, and pledged to donate $3500/month in podcast proceeds to the Against Malaria Foundation.
After the second episode, Sam joined Giving What We Can and pledged 10% of profits from his Waking Up app (well over $3500/month) to effective charities.
Impact
Both episodes seem to have caused a spike in GWWC memberships, and the second may have boosted EA engagement more generally.…
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Dec 12, 2021
A do-gooder's safari by Owen_Cotton-Barratt
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this is: A do-gooder's safari, published by Owen_Cotton-Barratt on the effective altruism forum.
Doing good things is hard.
We’re gonna look at some deep tensions that attach to trying to do really good stuff. To keep it relatable(?!), I’ve included badly-drawn animals.
The mole pursues goals which are within comprehension and reach. At best the mole knows the immediate challenges extremely well and does a great job at dealing with them. At worst, the mole is digging in a random direction.
The giraffe looks into the distance, focusing on the big picture, and perhaps on challenges that will come up later but aren’t even apparent today. At best the giraffe identifies crucial directions to steer in. At worst, the giraffe doesn’t look where they’re going and trips over, or has ideas which are dumb because they don’t engage with d…
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Dec 12, 2021
SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work by RyanCarey
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this is: SHOW: A framework for shaping your talent for direct work, published by RyanCarey on the effective altruism forum.
By Ryan Carey, cowritten with Tegan Mccaslin (this post represents our own opinions, and not those of our current or former employers)
TLDR: If your career as an EA has stalled, you’ll eventually break through if you do one (or more) of four things: gaining skills outside the EA community, assisting the work of more senior EAs, finding valuable projects that EAs aren’t willing to do, or finding projects that no one is doing yet.
Let’s say you’ve applied to, and been rejected, from several jobs in high-impact areas over the past year (a situation that is becoming more common as the size of the movement grows). At first you thought you were just unlucky, but it looks increasingly likely that your current skill…
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Dec 12, 2021
Cultured meat: A comparison of techno-economic analyses By Linch, Neil_Dullaghan
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this is: Cultured meat: A comparison of techno-economic analyses, published By Linch, Neil_Dullaghan on the effective altruism forum.
For cultured meat to move the needle on climate, a sequence of as-yet-unforeseen breakthroughs will still be necessary. We’ll need to train cells to behave in ways that no cells have behaved before. We’ll need to engineer bioreactors that defy widely accepted principles of chemistry and physics. We’ll need to build an entirely new nutrient supply chain using sustainable agricultural practices, inventing forms of bulk amino acid production that are cheap, precise, and safe. Investors will need to care less about money. Germs will have to more or less behave. It will be work worthy of many Nobel prizes—certainly for science, possibly for peace. And this expensive, fragile, infinitely complex puzzle w…
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Dec 12, 2021
Desperation Hamster Wheels by Nicole_Ross
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this is: Desperation Hamster Wheels, published by Nicole_Rosson the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for
In my first few jobs, I felt desperate to have an impact. I was often filled with anxiety that I might not be able to. My soul ached. Fear propelled me to action. I remember sitting in a coffee shop one Saturday trying to read a book that I thought would help me learn about biosafety, an impactful career path I wanted to explore. While I found the book interesting, I had to force myself to read each page because I was worn out. Yet I kept chugging along because I thought it was my lifeline, even though I was making extremely little progress. I thought: If I don’t do this excellently, I’ll be a failure.
There were three critical factors that, taken together, formed a “desperation hamster wheel,” a cycle of desperati…
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Dec 12, 2021
EA Funds is more flexible than you might think by Jonas Vollmer
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this is: EA Funds is more flexible than you might think, published by Jonas Vollmer on the effective altruism forum.
I’ve noticed that some people seem to have misconceptions about what kinds of grants EA Funds can make, so I put together a quick list of things we can fund that may be surprising to some of you.
(Reminder: our funding deadline for this round is March 7, though you can apply at any time of the year.)
EA Funds will consider building longer-term funding relationships, not just one-off grants.
Even though we typically make one-off grant decisions and have some turnover among fund managers, we can consider commitments to provide longer-term funding. We are also happy to otherwise help with the predictability of funding, e.g. by sharing our thoughts on how easy or hard we expect it to be to get funding in the future.
EA Funds…
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Dec 12, 2021
Aligning Recommender Systems as Cause Area by IvanVendrov
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this is: Aligning Recommender Systems as Cause Area, published by IvanVendrov on the effective altruism forum.
by Ivan Vendrov and Jeremy Nixon
Disclaimer: views expressed here are solely our own and not those of our employers or any other organization.
Most recent conversations about the future focus on the point where technology surpasses human capability. But they overlook a much earlier point where technology exceeds human vulnerabilities.
The Problem, Center for Humane Technology.
The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops that we have created are destroying how society works.
Chamath Palihapitiya, former Vice President of user growth at Facebook.
The most popular recommender systems - the Facebook news feed, the YouTube homepage, Netflix, Twitter - are optimized for metrics that are easy to measure and improve, like number of c…
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Dec 12, 2021
[Podcast] Having a successful career with anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome by Aaron Gertler
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this is: [Podcast] Having a successful career with anxiety, depression, and imposter syndrome, published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for/
Note: 80,000 Hours wants to keep the interviewee's name off of Google in this context. You can use "Howie" in comments, but please don't use his surname. We'll redact the surname if any comment happens to use it.
I'm linking to one of my favorite 80,000 Hours podcast episodes ever — not only because the topic seems important and broadly relevant, but because some of the interviewee's advice was directly applicable to problems I was experiencing and problems I've been working through with friends who are struggling.
I'd honestly recommend the episode to basically anyone in or out of EA, with a few caveats:
As 80,000 Hours notes, the conversation gets pretty int…
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Dec 12, 2021
Ask Me Anything! by William_MacAskill
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this is: Ask Me Anything!, published by William_MacAskill on the effective altruism forum.
Thanks for all the questions, all - I’m going to wrap up here! Maybe I'll do this again in the future, hopefully others will too!
Hi,
I thought that it would be interesting to experiment with an Ask Me Anything format on the Forum, and I’ll lead by example. (If it goes well, hopefully others will try it out too.)
Below I’ve written out what I’m currently working on. Please ask any questions you like, about anything: I’ll then either respond on the Forum (probably over the weekend) or on the 80k podcast, which I’m hopefully recording soon (and maybe as early as Friday). Apologies in advance if there are any questions which, for any of many possible reasons, I’m not able to respond to.
If you don't want to post your question publicly or…
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Dec 12, 2021
Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads by Mauricio
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads , published by Mauricio on the effective altruism forum.
Thanks to Kuhan Jeyapragasan for comments and relevant/motivating conversation. In the spirit of saving time, I wrote this one relatively quickly.
Summary / Introduction
When I started undergrad, I decided to take almost as many classes as I could that term—wouldn’t want to miss out on limited opportunities to learn, right? I spent that whole term hunched over books and stressing over how behind I was (so, not meeting people, not getting research or job experience, not figuring out what problems to prioritize, not getting others into high-impact careers), only to later realize my classes had taught me little of value.
That doesn’t seem to have been a unique experience; many impact-driven undergrads fill their schedule wit…
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Dec 12, 2021
Please Take the 2020 EA Survey by Peter Wildeford
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this is: Please Take the 2020 EA Survey, published by Peter Wildeford on the effective altruism forum.
The 2020 Effective Altruism Survey is now live at the following link:
If you would like to share the EA Survey with others, please share this link:
The survey will remain open through the end of the year.
What is the EA Survey?
The EA Survey provides valuable information about the demographics of the EA community, how people get involved, how they donate, what causes they prioritise, their experiences of EA, and more.
The estimated average completion time for the main section of this year’s survey is 20 minutes. There is also an ‘Extra Credit’ section at the end of the survey, if you are happy to answer some more questions.
What's new this year?
There are two important changes regarding privacy and sharing permissions this year:
1…
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Dec 12, 2021
Hinge of History Refuted (April Fools' Day)
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this is: Hinge of History Refuted (April Fools' Day), published by Thomas Kwa on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction
Is the present the hingiest time in history? The answer to this question is enormously important to altruists, and as such has attracted the attention of many philosophers and researchers: Nick Beckstead, Phil Trammell, Toby Ord, Aron Vallinder, Allan Dafoe, Matt Wage, Holden Karnofsky, Carl Shulman, and Will MacAskill. I attempt to answer the question through a novel method of hinginess analysis.
Flawed Hinginess Measures
To determine whether one era of history is hingier than another, we must have some way to measure hinginess. The naive method used by many previous researchers is to simply count the number of hinges in each time period. There are several problems with this idea.
Suppose that a heavy door is held…
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Dec 12, 2021
COVID-19 brief for friends and family by eca
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: COVID-19 brief for friends and family, published by eca on the effective altruism forum.
People have been saying all kinds of wild stuff about the new coronavirus. I work in biosecurity and have been following the outbreak since the beginning. What follows is my best attempt to communicate what we know about the virus, and how to prepare, with my family and friends. I thought I would share in case others have been looking for a similar document.
This is NOT intended to be a detailed, rigorous justification of the preparation measures I've outlined, nor an authoritative statement on the best current estimates for epidemiological parameters. Instead, I try to be as straightforward as possible, cite only the action-relevant details, and align with the best recommendations I've heard from the EA biosecurity community as well as expe…
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Dec 12, 2021
Finding equilibrium in a difficult time by Julia_Wise
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Finding equilibrium in a difficult time, published by Julia_Wise on the effective altruism forum.
To start: I don’t want to say that self-isolation is that bad in the scheme of things. People have lost their lives, they’ve lost loved ones. Healthcare workers are working hard, at their own risk, to protect us all. Some other workers don’t have a choice about continuing to work in person. And for some immunocompromised people and their families, self-isolation is the reality much or all of the time.
But I’m writing for those of us who aren’t physically ill, are doing some amount of self-isolation or social distancing because of the pandemic, and are not finding it easy. Most of this isn’t specific to EAs, but I hope it’s useful.
We are all having a hard time with this
I assume I’m not the only person who finished l…
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Dec 12, 2021
Donating money, buying happiness: new meta-analyses comparing the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and psychotherapy in terms of subjective well-being by MichaelPlant, JoelMcGuire
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Donating money, buying happiness: new meta-analyses comparing the cost-effectiveness of cash transfers and psychotherapy in terms of subjective well-being, published by MichaelPlant, JoelMcGuire on the effective altruism forum.
This is a cross-post from the website of the Happier Lives Institute.
TL;DR: We estimate that StrongMinds is 12 times (95% CI: 4, 24) more cost-effective than GiveDirectly in terms of subjective well-being. This puts it roughly on a par with the top deworming charities recommended by GiveWell.
[Edit 26/10/2021: Table 4 and accompanying text added]
1. Background and summary
In order to do as much good as possible, we need to compare how much good different things do in a single ‘currency’. At the Happier Lives Institute (HLI), we believe the best approach is to measure the effects of different interven…
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Dec 12, 2021
Careers Questions Open Thread Benjamin_Todd
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this is: Careers Questions Open Thread, published Benjamin_Todd on the effective altruism forum.
Hi everyone,
Many people in EA aren’t able to get as much career advice as they’d like, while at the same time, hundreds of EAs are happy to provide informal advice and mentoring within their career area.
Much of what we do in our one-on-one advice at 80,000 Hours is try to connect these two groups, but we’re not able to cover a significant number of people. At the same time, spaces like the EA careers discussion FB group don’t seem to have taken off as a place where people get concrete advice.
As an experiment, I thought we could try having an open career questions thread on the Forum.
By posting a reply here, anyone can post a question about their career, without having to make a top level post, and anyone on the forum can write an…
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Dec 12, 2021
Introducing High Impact Professionals by DevonFritz, Federico Speziali
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Introducing High Impact Professionals, published by DevonFritz, Federico Speziali on the effective altruism forum.
Overview
It is our pleasure to present to you our new EA organization, High Impact Professionals (HIP). Our vision is to enable EA working professionals to have the biggest positive impact possible. We imagine a community working together for the greater good, contributing not only through their money but also with their time and skills. We recently went through the 2021 Charity Entrepreneurship Incubation Program and received $100,000 in funding for our first full year of operations.
The rest of this document will outline:
The problem we are solving
How we are solving it
Our next steps
How you can get involved
Key Takeaways
We created HIP to maximize the impact of EA working professionals and solve several identifi…
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Dec 12, 2021
£4bn for the global poor: the UK's 0.7% by Sanjay
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this is: £4bn for the global poor: the UK's 0.7%, published by Sanjay on the effective altruism forum.
Background
The UK Chancellor of the Exchequer announced that the government will reduce the amount of spend on international development from 0.7% of GNI to 0.5%. (read more, e.g., here). This means that the government will spend £10bn on aid instead of £14bn.
This post sets out an attempt to undo this decision.
I'm hoping we can find more people to help with analysis and to donate to the campaign.
Plan
At a high level, the plan we have in mind is essentially taken straight from the tech startup playbook:
Identify the highest leverage constituencies (probably those with "moderate" Tory MPs)
perform google and facebook ads to identify people in those constituencies willing to write a letter or email to their MP
recruit them and provid…
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Dec 12, 2021
FTX EA Fellowships by FTX Foundation
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this is: FTX EA Fellowships, published by FTX Foundation on the effective altruism forum.
Announcing a new program: FTX EA Fellowships!
FTX is a cryptocurrency exchange headquartered in the Bahamas, founded with the goal of making money to give to effective causes. We’re looking to
support people doing exciting work
kickstart an EA community in the Bahamas
To those ends, we’re looking for applications from people already working on EA jobs or projects that can be done from the Bahamas.
For fellowship recipients, we’ll provide:
travel to and from the Bahamas
housing in the Bahamas for up to 6 months
an EA coworking space
a stipend of $10,000
Round 1 applications close 11/15. We’ll get back with responses by 12/1, and accommodations will start in January. This is just an initial default schedule: happy to accept off-cycle applicati…
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Dec 12, 2021
Candy for Nets by Jeff_Kaufman
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Candy for Nets, published by Jeff_Kaufman on the effective altruism forum.
Yesterday morning my five-year-old daughter was asking me about mosquitos, and we got on to talking about malaria, nets, and how Julia and I donate to the AMF to keep other kids from getting sick and potentially dying. Lily took it very seriously, and proposed that when I retire she take my programming job and donate in my place.
I told her that she didn't need to wait until after I retired to start helping, and she decided she wanted to sell candy on the bike path as a fundraiser. I told her we could do this after naps if the weather was still nice, and the first thing she said when I got her up from her nap was that she wanted to go make a sign.
She dictated to me, "Lily is selling candy to raise money for malaria nets, $1" and I wrote the letters. She…
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Dec 12, 2021
Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library by Kat Woods
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Listen to more EA content with The Nonlinear Library, published by Kat Woods on the effective altruism forum.
Listen here: Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Apple. Or, just search for "Nonlinear Library" in your preferred podcasting app.
We are excited to announce the launch of The Nonlinear Library, which allows you to easily listen to top EA content on your podcast player. We use text-to-speech software to create an automatically updating repository of audio content from the EA Forum, Alignment Forum, LessWrong, and other EA blogs.
In the rest of this post, we’ll explain our reasoning for the audio library, why it’s useful, why it’s potentially high impact, its limitations, and our plans. You can read it here or listen to the post in podcast form here.
Goal: increase the number of people who read EA research
An EA…
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Dec 12, 2021
2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison by Larks
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: 2019 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison , published by Larks on the effective altruism forum.
Cross-posted to LessWrong here.
Introduction
As in 2016, 2017 and 2018, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments.
My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2019 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2019 budgets to get a sense of urgency.
I’d like to apologize in advance to…
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Dec 12, 2021
What will 80,000 Hours provide (and not provide) within the effective altruism community? by Benjamin_Todd
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: What will 80,000 Hours provide (and not provide) within the effective altruism community?, published by Benjamin_Todd on the effective altruism forum.
There are many career services that would be useful to the effective altruism community, and unfortunately 80,000 Hours is not able to provide them all.
In this post, I aim to sum up what we intend to provide and what we can’t, to make it easier for other groups to fill these gaps.
80,000 Hours’ online content is also serving as one of the most common ways that people get introduced to the effective altruism community, but we’re not the ideal introduction for many types of people, which I also list in the section on online articles.
You can see our full plans in our annual review .
Target audience
Our aim is to do the most we can to fill the key skill gaps in the world’s m…
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Dec 12, 2021
Things I Learned at the EA Student Summit by Akash
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this is: Things I Learned at the EA Student Summit, published by Akash on the effective altruism forum.
This weekend, I attended the EA Student Summit. Below, I’m summarizing some of my “key takeaways”—ideas that I found interesting, helpful, or thought-provoking. I’m dividing them into a few key themes and questions:
How to Learn About EA
How can we effectively learn about EA? Will Payne had some helpful suggestions, summarized below:
We don’t need to reinvent the wheel—there are already a lot of resources (and curated libraries of resources) out there. Oxford’s EA Introductory Fellowship reading list seems like a great place to start.
We should be explicit about updating our beliefs. If we change our mind about something, it’s useful for us to document it and share it with others.
We should strive to learn more effort…
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Dec 12, 2021
Why I am probably not a longtermist by Denise_Melchin
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this is: Why I am probably not a longtermist, published by Denise_Melchin on the effective altruism forum.
tl;dr: I am much more interested in making the future good, as opposed to long or big, as I neither think the world is great now nor am convinced it will be in the future. I am uncertain whether there are any scenarios which lock us into a world at least as bad as now that we can avoid or shape in the near future. If there are none, I think it is better to focus on “traditional neartermist” ways to improve the world.
I thought it might be interesting to other EAs why I do not feel very on board with longtermism, as longtermism is important to a lot of people in the community.
This post is about the worldview called longtermism. It does not describe a position on cause prioritisation. It is very possible for causes commonly assoc…
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Dec 12, 2021
We need alternatives to Intro EA Fellowships by Ashley Lin
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: We need alternatives to Intro EA Fellowships, published by Ashley Lin on the effective altruism forum.
Thanks to Kuhan Jeyapragasan, Akash Wasil, Olivia Jimenez, and Lizka Vaintrob for helpful comments / conversations.
TLDR: I think group organizers have become anchored on the idea of Intro EA Fellowships as 8-week small-group things, which might actually be a sub-optimal way to introduce promising students to the EA world. We need new alternatives that are exciting, immersive, and enable EA-interested students to move as quickly as they’d like through the EA funnel.
The Intro EA Fellowship (also known as the Arete Fellowship) is a program where a small group of fellows and a facilitator meet multiple times to learn about some aspect of effective altruism. Stanford EA’s virtual Intro EA Fellowship was the first structured EA…
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Dec 12, 2021
500 Million, But Not A Single One More by jai
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this is: 500 Million, But Not A Single One More, published by jai on the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for http://blog.jaibot.com/?p=413
We will never know their names.
The first victim could not have been recorded, for there was no written language to record it. They were someone’s daughter, or son, and someone’s friend, and they were loved by those around them. And they were in pain, covered in rashes, confused, scared, not knowing why this was happening to them or what they could do about it — victims of a mad, inhuman god. There was nothing to be done — humanity was not strong enough, not aware enough, not knowledgeable enough, to fight back against a monster that could not be seen.
It was in Ancient Egypt, where it attacked slave and pharaoh alike. In Rome, it effortlessly decimated armies. It killed in Syria.…
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Dec 12, 2021
Yale EA’s Fellowship Application Scores were not Predictive of Eventual Engagement by ThomasWoodside, jessica_mccurdy
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Yale EA’s Fellowship Application Scores were not Predictive of Eventual Engagement, published by ThomasWoodside, jessica_mccurdy on the effective altruism forum.
Written by Jessica McCurdy and Thomas Woodside
Overview
Yale has been one of the only groups in the past advocating for a selective fellowship. However, after we noticed a couple instances of people who had barely been accepted to the fellowship becoming extremely engaged with the group, we decided to do an analysis of our scoring of applications and eventual engagement. We found no correlation.
We think this shows the possibility that some of the people we have rejected in the past could have become extremely engaged members, which seems like a lot of missed value. We are still doing more analysis using different metrics and methods. For now we are tentatively recomm…
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Dec 12, 2021
Long-Term Future Fund: April 2019 grant recommendations by Habryka
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Long-Term Future Fund: April 2019 grant recommendations, published by Habryka on the effective altruism forum.
Please note that the following grants are only recommendations, as all grants are still pending an internal due diligence process by CEA.
This post contains our allocation and some explanatory reasoning for our Q1 2019 grant round. We opened up an application for grant requests earlier this year which was open for about one month, after which we received an unanticipated large donation of about $715k. This caused us to reopen the application for another two weeks. We then used a mixture of independent voting and consensus discussion to arrive at our current grant allocation.
What is listed below is only a set of grant recommendations to CEA, who will run these by a set of due-diligence tests to ensure that they are comp…
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Dec 12, 2021
When can I eat meat again? by clairey
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this is: When can I eat meat again?, published by clairey on the effective altruism forum.
By Claire Yip, co-founder of Cellular Agriculture UK. These views are my own.
Summary
Timeline: When we can expect highly similar cost-competitive alternatives to animal products
Timeline
There is a lot of uncertainty around when we will be able to eat meat grown from cells, and how we should divide our efforts between that, plant-based alternatives, and other forms of animal advocacy. This post seeks to give sensible, unbiased views on the future of alternative proteins.
However, these views are uncertain too: I have c.40-60% confidence. These estimates are not set in stone. Factors like investment and activity would quicken progress, but things will also probably take longer than we expect, for unexpected reasons, and we don’t know everything t…
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Dec 12, 2021
Introducing LEEP: Lead Exposure Elimination Project by Jack, LuciaC
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Introducing LEEP: Lead Exposure Elimination Project, published by Jack, LuciaC on the effective altruism forum.
We are excited to announce the launch of Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP), a new EA organisation incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship. Our mission is to reduce lead poisoning, which causes significant disease burden worldwide. We aim to achieve this by advocating for lead paint regulation in countries with large and growing burdens of lead poisoning from paint.
In this post, we make the case for lead exposure reduction as a priority, and outline our plan to address this problem.
The Problem
Others in the effective altruism community have already identified that working on lead poisoning could be a high-impact opportunity (see here, here, and here). Through the Importance, Tractability, Neglectedness framework,…
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Dec 12, 2021
2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison by Larks
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: 2020 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, published by Larks on the effective altruism forum.
Write a Review
cross-posted to LW here.
Introduction
As in 2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, I have attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to a securities analyst with regards to possible investments.
My aim is basically to judge the output of each organisation in 2020 and compare it to their budget. This should give a sense of the organisations' average cost-effectiveness. We can also compare their financial reserves to their 2021 budgets to get a sense of urgency.
I’d like to apologize…
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Dec 12, 2021
EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $22,000 in prizes for good stories by Aaron Gertler
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $22,000 in prizes for good stories, published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum.
Update: The contest is now closed! All submissions made by 11:59 PST on Friday, October 29 will be considered. This includes a few posts whose authors had trouble submitting, but contacted me about before the deadline.
Stories are a key part of how EA has grown since its beginning. Some examples:
The Drowning Child and the Expanding Circle, which probably did more to launch the EA movement than any other piece of writing
Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, which introduced many readers to important ideas about good epistemics and AI risk
500 Million, But Not A Single One More, which has been read aloud in conference halls for hundreds of people and is one of the first essays in the EA Handbo…
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Dec 12, 2021
Survey on AI existential risk scenarios by SamClarke, Alexis Carlier, jonasschuett
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Survey on AI existential risk scenarios, published by SamClarke, Alexis Carlier, jonasschuett on the effective altruism forum.
Cross-posted to LessWrong.
Summary
In August 2020, we conducted an online survey of prominent AI safety and governance researchers. You can see a copy of the survey at this link.[1]
We sent the survey to 135 researchers at leading AI safety/governance research organisations (including AI Impacts, CHAI, CLR, CSER, CSET, FHI, FLI, GCRI, MILA, MIRI, Open Philanthropy and PAI) and a number of independent researchers. We received 75 responses, a response rate of 56%.
The survey aimed to identify which AI existential risk scenarios[2] (which we will refer to simply as “risk scenarios”) those researchers find most likely, in order to (1) help with prioritising future work on exploring AI risk scenarios, and…
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Dec 12, 2021
How can we make Our World in Data more useful to the EA community? by EdMathieu
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: How can we make Our World in Data more useful to the EA community?, published by EdMathieu on the effective altruism forum.
I work at Our World in Data, where we try to make research and data on the world's largest problems more accessible and understandable.
I attended EA Global this past weekend, where I received very interesting input from many lovely people on potential improvements. But I thought it'd also be worth asking here to get wider feedback. I'm interested in all the following:
Low-hanging 'data fruits': simple datasets or charts that you know to be readily available somewhere and that would add significant value, but that aren't already listed here.
High-hanging fruits: things we could add to the website in the medium term with a lot more work (new subjects, larger datasets, data that needs a lot of cleaning, etc.)…
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Dec 12, 2021
Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is published!by matthew.vandermerwe
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Toby Ord’s ‘The Precipice’ is published!, published by matthew.vandermerwe on the effective altruism forum.
Write a Review
The Precipice: Existential Risk and the Future of Humanity is out today. I’ve been working on the book with Toby for the past 18 months, and I’m excited for everyone to read it. I think it has the potential to make a profound difference to the way the world thinks about existential risk.
How to get it
It's out in the UK on March 5 and US March 24
An audiobook, narrated by Toby himself, is out March 24
You can buy it on Amazon now, or at theprecipice.com/purchase
You can download the opening chapters for free by signing up to the newsletter at www.theprecipice.com
What you can do
Read the book
Talk about it with your friends and family, or share quotes you like on social media
If you enjoy it, consi…
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Dec 12, 2021
Everyday Longtermism by Owen_Cotton-Barratt
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Everyday Longtermism, published by Owen_Cotton-Barratt on the effective altruism forum.
This post is about a question:
What does longtermism recommend doing in all sorts of everyday situations?
I've been thinking (on and off) about versions of this question over the last year or two. Properly I don't want sharp answers which try to give the absolute best actions in various situations (which are likely to be extremely context dependent and perhaps also weird or hard to find), but good blueprints for longtermist decision-making in everyday situations: pragmatic guidance which will tend to produce good outcomes if followed.
The first part of the post explains why I think this is an important question to look into. The second part talks about my current thinking and some guess answers: that everyday longtermism might involve seeking…
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Dec 12, 2021
Empirical data on value drift by Joey
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this is: Empirical data on value drift, published by Joey on the effective altruism forum.
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Why It’s Important to Know the Risk of Value Drift
The concept of value drift is that over time, people will become less motivated to do altruistic things. This is not to be confused with changing cause areas or methods of doing good. Value drift has a strong precedent of happening for other related concepts, both ethical things (such as being vegetarian) and things that generally take willpower (such as staying a healthy weight).
Value drift seems very likely to be a concern for many EAs, and if it were a major concern, it would substantially affect career and donation plans.
For example, if value drift rarely happens, putting money into a savings account with the intent of donating it might be basically as good as putting it into…
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Dec 12, 2021
Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams by stefan.torges
welcome to the nonlinear library, where we use text-to-speech software to convert the best writing from the rationalist and ea communities into audio.
this is: Ingredients for creating disruptive research teams, published by stefan.torges on the effective altruism forum.
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Introduction
This post tries to answer the question of what qualities make some research teams more effective than others. I was particularly interested in learning more about “disruptive” research teams, i.e. research teams that have an outsized impact on (1) the research landscape itself (e.g. by paving the way for new fields or establishing a new paradigm), and/or (2) society at large (e.g. by shaping technology or policy).[1] However, I expect the conclusions to be somewhat relevant for all research teams.
Research seems to have become increasingly important within the effective altruism community. In the past few years, GPI was founded, FHI started growing significantly, and Open Phil is expandi…
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Dec 12, 2021
Long-term investment fund at Founders Pledge by SjirH
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this is: Long-term investment fund at Founders Pledge, published by SjirH on the effective altruism forum.
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Edit 27/10/21: See these posts 1 2 3 for the next steps in this project. The post below was originally published on 09/01/20.
At Founders Pledge, we are considering launching a long-term investment fund for our members. Contributions to this fund would by default be invested, potentially over centuries or millennia to come. Grants would only be made when there’s a strong case that a donation opportunity beats investment from a longtermist perspective.
This idea was prompted in large part by recent research in the EA community, most notably Phil Trammell’s initial work on patient philanthropy and Will MacAskill’s forum post and the ensuing discussion on outside-view longtermism.
We have just started this investig…
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Dec 12, 2021
Improving Institutional Decision-Making: a new working group by IanDavidMoss, lauragreen, Vicky Clayton
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this is: Improving Institutional Decision-Making: a new working group, published by IanDavidMoss, lauragreen, Vicky Clayton on the effective altruism forum.
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By Ian David Moss, Vicky Clayton and Laura Green
Summary
This post describes recent and planned efforts to develop improving institutional decision-making (IIDM) as a cause area within and beyond the effective altruism movement.
Despite increasing interest in the topic over the past several years, IIDM remains underexplored compared to “classic” EA cause areas such as AI safety and animal welfare.
To help address some questions that have come up in our community-building work, we provide a working definition of IIDM, emphasizing its interdisciplinary nature and potential to bring together insights across professional, industry, and geographic boundaries.
We also de…
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Dec 12, 2021
AMA: Tim Ferriss, Michael Pollan, and Dr. Matthew W. Johnson on psychedelics research and philanthropy by Aaron Gertler
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this is: AMA: Tim Ferriss, Michael Pollan, and Dr. Matthew W. Johnson on psychedelics research and philanthropy, published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum.
We're excited to bring you an AMA with three people who have done a lot to increase the profile and prospects of psychedelic research.
Effective altruism has a history of engaging with psychedelics (see these posts, for example) as a promising intervention for mental health issues — one which could sharply reduce the suffering of tens or hundreds of millions of people.
Between Tim, Michael, and Matt, we have many kinds of expertise here — nonprofit investing, journalism, medicine, and more. We hope the discussion is interesting, and useful for anyone who's thought about working or giving within this area.
We'll gather questions for a couple of days. Michael and Ma…
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Dec 12, 2021
How to succeed as an early-stage researcher: the "lean startup" approach by tobyshevlane
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this is: How to succeed as an early-stage researcher: the "lean startup" approach, published by tobyshevlane on the effective altruism forum.
I am approaching the end of my AI governance PhD, and I’ve spent about 2.5 years as a researcher at FHI. During that time, I’ve learnt a lot about the formula for successful early-career research.
This post summarises my advice for people in the first couple of years. Research is really hard, and I want people to avoid the mistakes I’ve made.
My argument: At the early stage of your research career, you should think of yourself as an entrepreneur trying to build products (i.e. research outputs) that customers (i.e. the broader community) want to consume.
You might be thinking: but I thought I was trying to maximise my impact? Sure, but at this stage in your career, you don’t know what’s im…
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Dec 12, 2021
What areas are the most promising to start new EA meta charities - A survey of 40 EAs by Joey
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this is: What areas are the most promising to start new EA meta charities - A survey of 40 EAs, published by Joey on the effective altruism forum.
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Charity Entrepreneurship (CE) is researching EA meta as one of four cause areas in which we plan to launch charities in 2021. EA meta has always been an area we have been excited about and think holds promise (after all, CE is a meta charity). Historically we have not focused on meta areas for a few reasons. One of the most important is that we wanted to confirm the impact of the CE model in more measurable areas such as global health and animal advocacy. After two formal programs we are now sufficiently confident in the model to expand to more meta charities. We were also impressed by the progress and traction that Animal Advocacy Careers made in their first year. Founded based…
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Dec 12, 2021
Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22] by Habryka, Buck
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This is: Apply to the ML for Alignment Bootcamp (MLAB) in Berkeley [Jan 3 - Jan 22], published by Habryka, Buck on the Effective Altruism Forum.
We (Redwood Research and Lightcone Infrastructure) are organizing a bootcamp to bring people interested in AI Alignment up-to-speed with the state of modern ML engineering. We expect to invite about 20 technically talented effective altruists for three weeks of intense learning to Berkeley, taught by engineers working at AI Alignment organizations. The curriculum is designed by Buck Shlegeris (Redwood) and Ned Ruggeri (App Academy Co-founder). We will cover all expenses.
We aim to have a mixture of students, young professionals, and people who already have a professional track record in AI Alignment or EA, but want to brush up on their Machine Learning skills.
Dates are Jan 3 2022 - Jan 22 2022.…
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Dec 12, 2021
A Qualitative Analysis of Value Drift in EA by MarisaJurczyk
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This is: A Qualitative Analysis of Value Drift in EA, published by MarisaJurczyk on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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About a year ago, after working with the Effective Thesis Project, I started my undergraduate thesis on value drift in the effective altruism movement. I interviewed eighteen EAs about their experiences with value drift and used a grounded theory approach to identify common themes. This post is a condensed report of my results. The full, official version of the thesis can be found here.
Note that I’ve changed some of the terms used in my thesis in response to feedback, specifically “moral drift”, “internal value drift”, and “external value drift”. This post uses the most up-to-date terminology at time of posting, though these terms still a work-in-progress.
Summary
Value drift is a term EAs and ra…
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Dec 12, 2021
Geographic diversity in EA by AmAristizábal
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This is: Geographic diversity in EA, published by AmAristizábal on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Hi, I´m from Colombia (first post) and I want to share my thoughts on lack of geographic diversity in EA.
I suspect that due to lack of diversity, questions that could be relevant to EA have not been considered enough and here I share some of the ones that I deal with the most (although I don't have a strong position about most of these things and probably I just have not been aware if they DO HAVE been considered, in that case I would appreciate a lot if you could send links or recommendations):
-Whether giving locally could be better (or not) for donors in low and middle income countries:
Countries with weak currencies such as mine face high exchange rates (especially in hard times such as this pandemic). I have the intuiti…
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Dec 12, 2021
Why EA groups should not use “Effective Altruism” in their name by KoenSchoen
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This is: Why EA groups should not use “Effective Altruism” in their name, published by KoenSchoen on LessWrong.
Starting a conversation about the name “Effective Altruism” for local and university groups.
Abstract: most EA groups’ names follow the recipe “Effective Altruism + [location/university]”. In 2020 we founded a university EA group who’s name does not include the words “Effective Altruism”. We have grown rapidly, and it now seems more and more likely that our organization will stick around in years to come. We think our name played a non-negligible part in that. In fact, we believe that choosing an alternative name is one of the most cost-effective things you can do to make your group grow. In this article we argue that more (potential) groups should consider an alternative name. We propose a method for coming…
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Dec 12, 2021
EA Debate Championship & Lecture Series by Dan Lahav, sella
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This is: EA Debate Championship & Lecture Series, published by Dan Lahav, sella on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Executive Summary
On October 23-25 2020, we hosted the inaugural online EA Debate Championship - a three-day debate championship with EA-themed topics.
The championship had 150+ participants, from roughly 25 countries, that span 6 continents.
The championship was supported by the World Universities Debating Championship, aka WUDC - one of the largest international student-driven events in the world.
There were a total of 7 debate rounds - 5 preliminary rounds and 2 knockout rounds. The knockout rounds were held in 2 different language proficiency categories to promote inclusivity. In total over the course of that weekend over 500 EA-related speeches were delivered.
The championship featured a Distinguished Lecture Series as no…
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Dec 12, 2021
Despite billions of extra funding, small donors can still have a significant impact by Benjamin_Todd
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This is: Despite billions of extra funding, small donors can still have a significant impact, published by Benjamin_Todd on the Effective Altruism Forum.
I’ve written about how there’s now a lot more funding committed to effective altruism– about $50bn.
It’s natural to think this means small donors can no longer have much impact, and I’ve seen several cases of people saying they’re not sure whether their donations will do any good, because all the opportunities are being taken by large donors.
However, I think this isn’t right: more donations from small donors still have a significant impact. This means raising additional funding is still of value to the community, and I think earning to give and donating to e.g. the Long Term Future Fund, is a highly impactful thing to do – probably more impactful than the vast majority…
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Dec 12, 2021
Presenting: 2021 Incubated Charities (Charity Entrepreneurship) by Joey
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This is: Presenting: 2021 Incubated Charities (Charity Entrepreneurship), published by Joey on the Effective Altruism Forum.
2021 was the third year that we at Charity Entrepreneurship held our annual Incubation Program. Interest in the program was very high, with over 2000 applications submitted. 27 participants representing 16 countries graduated from the 2-month intensive training program, including teams that will start new organizations, individuals that are being hired by high-impact organizations, regional groups that will conduct research under our mentorship, and a foundation that will focus on providing grants to high-impact interventions.
We are delighted to announce the launch of five new charities and want to thank our funders: EA Funds, Open Philanthropy, and the CE Seed Network (a group of high-impact professionals) for th…
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Dec 12, 2021
Introducing Training for Good (TFG) by Cillian Crosson, Jan-WillemvanPutten, SteveThompson
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This is: Introducing Training for Good (TFG), published by Cillian Crosson, Jan-WillemvanPutten, SteveThompson on the Effective Altruism Forum.
We are excited to announce the launch of a new effective altruism training organisation, Training for Good (TFG).
trainingforgood.com
TFG aims to upskill people to tackle the most pressing global problems. TFG will identify the most critical skill gaps in the EA movement and address them through training. TFG was incubated by Charity Entrepreneurship in 2021.
This post introduces TFG, provides an overview of the problems we seek to tackle and presents our immediate plans for addressing them. The following is structured into:
Overview of TFG
TFG’s short term plans
Decisions and underlying assumptions
How you can help
Ask us anything
We thank Brian Tan, Charles He, Devon Fritz, Isaac Dunn, James…
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Dec 12, 2021
Notes on Managing to Change the World"by Peter Wildeford
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this is: Notes on Managing to Change the World", published by Peter Wildeford on the effective altruism forum.
The book “Managing to Change the World: The Nonprofit Manager's Guide to Getting Results” by Alison Green and Jerry Hauser comes highly recommended from a wide variety of top executive directors of non-profits, and after reading it, I can say these positive recommendations are entirely justified.
Don’t let the title fool you - while talk of “changing the world” may sound pie-in-the-sky or even hippyish, this book was relentlessly practical. The principles also matter more than just for non-profits. I think anyone managing others should read this book, regardless of whether they are working in non-profits or not. So far this is my favorite management book that I have ever read.[1]
The density of information is amazing a…
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Dec 12, 2021
A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations by AppliedDivinityStudies
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This is: A Red-Team Against the Impact of Small Donations, published by AppliedDivinityStudies on the Effective Altruism Forum.
In a comment on Benjamin Todd's article in favor of small donors, :
This article is kind of too "feel good" for my tastes. I'd also like to see a more angsty post that tries to come to grips with the fact that most of the impact is most likely not going to come from the individual people, and tries to see if this has any new implications, rather than justifying that all is good.
I am naturally an angsty person, and I don't carry much reputational risk, so this seemed like a natural fit.
I agree with NunoSempere that Benjamin's epistemics might be suffering from the nobility of his message. It's a feel-good encouragement to give, complete with a sympathetic photo of a very poor person who might benefit from your…
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Dec 12, 2021
You have more than one goal, and that's fine by Julia_Wise
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This is: You have more than one goal, and that's fine, published by Julia_Wise on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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This version of the essay has been lightly edited. You can find the original here.
When people come to an effective altruism event for the first time, the conversation often turns to projects they’re pursuing or charities they donate to. They often have a sense of nervousness around this, a feeling that the harsh light of cost-effectiveness is about to be turned on everything they do. To be fair, this is a reasonable thing to be apprehensive about, because many youngish people in EA do in fact have this idea that everything in life should be governed by cost-effectiveness. I've been there.
Cost-effectiveness analysis is a very useful tool. I wish more people and institutions applied it to more problems. But lik…
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Dec 12, 2021
Is Democracy a Fad? by Ben Garfinkel
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This is: Is Democracy a Fad?, published by Ben Garfinkel on the Effective Altruism Forum.
This cross-post from my personal blog explains why I think democracy will probably recede within the next several centuries, supposing people are still around.
The key points are that: (1) Up until the past couple centuries, nearly all states have been dictatorships. (2) There are many examples of system-wide social trends, including the rise of democracy in Ancient Greece, that have lasted for a couple centuries and then been reversed. (3) If certain popular theories about democratization are right, then widespread automation would negate recent economic changes that have allowed democracy to flourish.
This prediction might have some implications for what people who are trying to improve the future should do today (although I'm not sure what these…
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Dec 12, 2021
I scraped all public "Effective Altruists" Goodreads reading lists by MaxRa
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This is: I scraped all public "Effective Altruists" Goodreads reading lists, published by MaxRa on the Effective Altruism Forum.
A couple of weeks ago I mentioned the idea of scraping the reading lists of the members of the Effective Altruists Goodreads group. The initial motivation was around the idea that EAs might be reading too much of the same books, and we might improve this by finding out which books are read relatively little compared to how many EAs proclaim that they want to read them. I got some positive feedback and got to work. Besides helping a little with improving our exploration of literature, I think the results also serve as an interesting survey of the reading behavior of EAs. Though we might want to keep in mind a possible selection bias for EAs and EA-adjacent people that share their reading behavior on Goodreads.
F…
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Dec 12, 2021
Five New EA Charities with High Potential for Impact by Joey
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This is: Five New EA Charities with High Potential for Impact, published by by Joey on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Cross-posted from Charity Entrepreneurship blog.
Hundreds of ideas researched, thousands of applications considered, and a two-month intensive Incubation Program culminated in five new charities being founded. Each of these charities has the potential to have a large impact on the world and to become one of the most cost-effective in their field.
We’re delighted to announce the five new charities who have just launched through our 2020 Incubation Program:
Lead Exposure Elimination Project (LEEP) - advocating for lead paint regulation to reduce lead poisoning and improve the health, well-being, and potential of children worldwide.
Animal Ask - maximizing farmed animal asks through dedicated research.
Family…
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Dec 12, 2021
Can EA leverage an Elon-vs-world-hunger news cycle? by Jackson Wagner
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This is: Can EA leverage an Elon-vs-world-hunger news cycle?, published by Jackson Wagner on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary: Elon Musk promises to donate six billion dollars if the UN can explain how this would truly solve world hunger (it would probably be much more expensive). Regardless of whether the donation happens or not, a major news cycle about the cost-effectiveness of international charitable donations seems like a great opportunity to raise the public profile of effective altruism.
Details of The Billionare-Bashing Drama
US senators are currently debating a large bill that will probably include some form of tax increase on the rich. Elon Musk, now the world's richest man, voiced his opposition to a proposed tax on unrealized capital gains. He framed his oppositon specifically in terms of government inefficiency, saying…
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Dec 12, 2021
If you like a post, tell the author! by Aaron Gertler
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This is: If you like a post, tell the author!, published by Aaron Gertler on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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I wonder whether I should write more comments pointing out what I liked in a post even if I don't have anything to criticise instead of just silently upvoting.
- Denise Melchin
I've heard this question quite a few times, and the answer is: Yes! Absolutely yes! Tell authors when you like something they've written!
Imaginary case study
Consider the experience of a Forum author who writes a post most readers like, in a world where people only comment if they have a critique.
They go to the Forum and see a string of comments:
"You're wrong about A."
"You're wrong about B."
"Why didn't you mention C?"
The post could have dozens of upvotes, but if it looks like anyone who closely engaged with it found something to criticize…
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Dec 12, 2021
Matt Levine on the Archegos failure by Kelsey Piper
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This is: Matt Levine on the Archegos failure, published by Kelsey Piper on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Matt Levine is a finance writer with a very entertaining free newsletter, also available on Bloomberg to subscribers. Today's newsletter struck me as a fairly remarkable failure analysis of a very expensive failure, in which Credit Suisse lost $5.5billion dollars when the hedge fund Archegos collapsed. That doesn't usually happen, and banks are, of course, very incentivized to avoid it. When it happened, Credit Suisse commissioned a very thorough investigation into what went wrong.
Some background: Archegos was a hedge fund, founded in 2013, that defaulted spectacularly this spring. The Wall Street Journal estimates that they lost $8billion in 10 days. Levine wrote at the time:
The basic story of Archegos is that it extracted as much…
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Dec 12, 2021
Movement Collapse Scenarios by rebecca_baron
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This is: Movement Collapse Scenarios, published by rebecca_baronon the Effective Altruism Forum.
Epistemic status: I mostly want to provide a starting point for discussion, not make any claims with high confidence.
Introduction and summary
It’s 2024. The effective altruism movement no longer exists, or is no longer doing productive work, for reasons our current selves wouldn’t endorse. What happened, and what could we have done about it in 2019?
I’m concerned not to hear this question discussed more often (though CEA briefly speculates on it here). It’s a prudent topic for a movement to be thinking about at any stage of its life cycle, but our small, young, rapidly changing community should be taking it especially seriously—it’s very hard to say right now where we’ll be in five years. I want to spur thinking on this issue b…
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Dec 12, 2021
Some promising career ideas beyond 80,000 Hours' priority paths by Ardenlk
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This is:Some promising career ideas beyond 80,000 Hours' priority paths, published by Ardenlk on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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This is a sister post to "Problem areas beyond 80,000 Hours' current priorities".
Introduction
In this post, we list some more career options beyond our priority paths that seem promising to us for positively influencing the long-term future.
Some of these are likely to be written up as priority paths in the future, or wrapped into existing ones, but we haven't written full profiles for them yet—for example policy careers outside AI and biosecurity policy that seem promising from a longtermist perspective.
Others, like information security, we think might be as promising for many people as our priority paths, but because we haven't investigated them much we're still unsure.
Still others seem like…
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Dec 12, 2021
Estimates of global captive vertebrate numbers by saulius
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This is: Estimates of global captive vertebrate numbers, published by saulius on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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In this article, I list all the estimates I could find for numbers of vertebrates that are farmed or kept in captivity for various purposes. I also describe some groups of captive vertebrates for which I found no estimates. For some bigger groups of animals that are less well-known amongst animal activists, I also describe trends and main welfare concerns.
The purpose of the article is to make it easier to find and compare estimates. Hopefully, this can also help animal advocates decide which issues to focus on. Note that I chose to focus on captive vertebrates simply to limit the scope of the article.
Summary tables
Estimates are summarized in the tables below. Numbers can also be explored in this spreadsheet. Th…
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Dec 12, 2021
Does Economic History Point Toward a Singularity? by Ben Garfinkel
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This is: Does Economic History Point Toward a Singularity?, published by Ben Garfinkel on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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I’ve ended up spending quite a lot of time researching premodern economic growth, as part of a hobby project that got out of hand. I’m sharing an informal but long write-up of my findings here, since I think they may be relevant to other longtermist researchers and I am unlikely to write anything more polished in the near future. Click here for the Google document.[1]
Summary
Over the next several centuries, is the economic growth rate likely to remain steady, radically increase, or decline back toward zero? This question has some bearing on almost every long-run challenge facing the world, from climate change to great power competition to risks from AI.
One way to approach the question is to consider…
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Dec 12, 2021
List of EA funding opportunities by MichaelA
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This is: List of EA funding opportunities, published by MichaelA on the Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a quickly written post listing opportunities for people to apply for funding from funders that are part of the EA community.
I'm probably forgetting some opportunities relevant to longtermist and EA movement building work, and many opportunities relevant to other cause areas. Please comment if you know of things I’m missing!
Maybe a list like this already exists; if so, please comment to mention it! Two somewhat similar things are the 80,000 Hours job board and Effective Thesis’s list of funding opportunities.
I strongly encourage people to consider applying for one or more of these things. Given how quick applying often is and how impactful funded projects often are, applying is often worthwhile in expectation even if your odds…
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Dec 12, 2021
Effective Altruism is a Question (not an ideology) by Helen
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This is: Effective Altruism is a Question (not an ideology), published by Helen on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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What is the definition of Effective Altruism? What claims does it make? What do you have to believe or do, to be an Effective Altruist?
I don’t think that any of these questions make sense.
It’s not surprising that we ask them: if you asked those questions about feminism or secularism, Islamism or libertarianism, the answers you would get would be relevant and illuminating. Different proponents of the same movement might give you slightly different answers, but synthesising the answers of several people would give you a pretty good feeling for the core of the movement.
But each of these movements is answering a question. Should men and women be equal? (Yes.) What role should the church play in governance? (N…
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Dec 12, 2021
My personal cruxes for working on AI safety by Buck
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This is: My personal cruxes for working on AI safety, published by Buck on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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The following is a heavily edited transcript of a talk I gave for the Stanford Effective Altruism club on 19 Jan 2020. I had rev.com transcribe it, and then Linchuan Zhang, Rob Bensinger and I edited it for style and clarity, and also to occasionally have me say smarter things than I actually said. Linch and I both added a few notes throughout. Thanks also to Bill Zito, Ben Weinstein-Raun, and Howie Lempel for comments.
I feel slightly weird about posting something so long, but this is the natural place to put it.
Over the last year my beliefs about AI risk have shifted moderately; I expect that in a year I'll think that many of the things I said here were dumb. Also, very few of the ideas here are original to me.
After…
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Dec 12, 2021
List of EA-related organisations
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This is: List of EA-related organisations, published by JamieGittins on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Update: After some suggestions in the comments I made a wiki, which anyone can add to. Hopefully this will enable us to keep the list up to date.
I’ve constantly been discovering new, exciting organisations in the years since I got involved in EA. Recently, I came across WANBAM (Women and Non-Binary Altruism Mentors) and wished that I’d known about it sooner, so I could’ve started recommending it to people who I thought would be interested. It then occurred to me that people probably have similar experiences all the time in EA. I couldn’t find a comprehensive list of EA-related organisations that already existed, so I decided to make one. By collecting as many EA-related organisations as I can into one place, I hop…
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Dec 12, 2021
Humanities Research Ideas for Longtermists by Lizka
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This is: Humanities Research Ideas for Longtermists, published by Lizka on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
This post lists 10 longtermism-relevant project ideas for people with humanities interests or backgrounds. Most of these ideas are for research projects, but some are for summaries, new outreach content, etc. (See below for what I mean by “humanities.”)
The ideas, in brief:
Study future-oriented beliefs in certain religions or groups
Study the ways in which incidental qualities become essential to institutions
Explore fiction as a tool for moral circle expansion
Study how longtermists use different forms of media and how this might be improved
Study how non-EAs actually view AI safety issues, and how we got here
Produce anthropological/ethnographic studies of unusually relevant groups
Apply insights from education, history…
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Dec 12, 2021
A personal take on longtermist AI governance by lukeprog
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This is: A personal take on longtermist AI governance, published by lukeprog on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Several months ago, I summarized Open Philanthropy's work on AI governance (which I lead) for a general audience here. In this post, I elaborate my thinking on AI governance in more detail for people who are familiar with effective altruism, longtermism, existential risk, and related topics. Without that context, much of what I say below may be hard to understand, and easy to misunderstand.
These are my personal views, and don't necessarily reflect Open Phil's views, or the views of other individuals at Open Phil.
In this post, I
briefly recap the key points of my previous post,
explain what I see as the key bottlenecks in the space, and
share my current opinions about how people sympathetic to longtermism and/or AI existential r…
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Dec 12, 2021
A cause can be too neglected by saulius
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This is: A cause can be too neglected, published by saulius on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Effective Altruism movement often uses a scale-neglectedness-tractability framework. As a result of that framework, when I discovered issues like baitfish, fish stocking, and rodents fed to pet snakes, I thought that it is an advantage that they are almost maximally neglected (seemingly no one is working on them). Now I think that it’s also a disadvantage because there are set-up costs associated with starting work on a new cause. For example:
You first have to bridge the knowledge gap. There are no shoulders of giants you can stand on, you have to build up knowledge from scratch.
Then you probably need to start a new organization where all employees will be beginners. No one will know what they are doing because no one has worke…
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Dec 12, 2021
Our plans for hosting an EA wiki on the Forum by Aaron Gertler
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This is: Our plans for hosting an EA wiki on the Forum, published by Aaron Gertler on the Effective Altruism Forum.
We are in the process of implementing a major project on the Forum — turning our current system of tags into a full-fledged “EA wiki”.
Under this system, many of the tags used for posts will also serve as articles in the wiki. Many articles in the Wiki will also serve as tags that can be applied to articles.
However, there are exceptions in both directions. Some tags don’t make sense as wiki articles (for example, “EA London Update”). And some articles are too narrow to be useful tags (for example, Abhijit Banerjee). These will be marked as “wiki only” — they can be found with the Forum’s search engine, but can’t be used to tag posts.
The project is made possible by the work of Pablo Stafforini, who re…
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Dec 12, 2021
The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now by abergal
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This is: The Long-Term Future Fund has room for more funding, right now , published by abergal on the Effective Altruism Forum.
The Long-Term Future Fund is on track to approve $1.5M - $2M of grants this round. This is 3 - 4x what we’ve spent in any of our last five grant rounds and most of our current fund balance.
We received 129 applications this round, desk rejected 33 of them, and are evaluating the remaining 96. Looking at our preliminary evaluations, I’d guess we’ll fund 20 - 30 of these.
In our last comparable grant round, April 2019, we received 91 applications and funded 13, for a total of $875,150. Compared to that round:
We’ve received more applications. (42% more than in April.)
We’re likely to distribute more money per applicant, because several applications are for larger grants, and requested salaries have gone…
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Dec 12, 2021
More EAs should consider “non-EA” jobs by abergal
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This is: More EAs should consider “non-EA” jobs, published by abergal on the Effective Altruism Forum.
The Long-Term Future Fund is on track to approve $1.5M - $2M of grants this round. This is 3 - 4x what we’ve spent in any of our last five grant rounds and most of our current fund balance.
We received 129 applications this round, desk rejected 33 of them, and are evaluating the remaining 96. Looking at our preliminary evaluations, I’d guess we’ll fund 20 - 30 of these.
In our last comparable grant round, April 2019, we received 91 applications and funded 13, for a total of $875,150. Compared to that round:
We’ve received more applications. (42% more than in April.)
We’re likely to distribute more money per applicant, because several applications are for larger grants, and requested salaries have gone up. (The average gran…
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Dec 12, 2021
Announcing the Patient Philanthropy Fund by SjirH
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This is: Announcing the Patient Philanthropy Fund, published by SjirH on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Today, after nearly two years of preparations, Founders Pledge is launching the Patient Philanthropy Fund (PPF): a grantmaking vehicle that invests to give to safeguard and improve the long-term future.
The PPF is incubated as a special trust within Founders For Good - the Founders Pledge UK entity. It is managed by a Management Committee consisting of purpose-aligned experts on timing of giving. Our aim is to further develop and grow it over the coming 10 years and eventually spin it out as a separate charitable entity.
The Fund is open for contributions by non-FP-members via EA Funds. We are launching the PPF with $1m in pre-seed funding contributed by a list of Founding Partners and Supporters, including many EA community members.
Pl…
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Dec 12, 2021
EA is vetting-constrained by toonalfrink
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This is: EA is vetting-constrained, published by toonalfrink on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Re: What to do with people? and After one year of applying for EA jobs: It is really, really hard to get hired by an EA organisation
Epistemic status: just my personal impression. Please prove me wrong.
So we know that:
1) In aggregate, there are billions of dollars in EA
2) There are lots of surplus talented people looking for EA work, that can't get it
and I would like to add:
3) I estimate that there are at least 10-20 budding organisations that would love to use this money to get these people to work, and scale beyond their current size, and properly tackle the problem they aim to solve. I know at least 5 founders like that personally.
So with all the ingredients in place for amazing movement growth, why isn't the magic happen…
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Dec 12, 2021
There's Lots More To Do by Jeff_Kaufman
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This is: There's Lots More To Do, published by Jeff_Kaufman on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Benjamin Hoffman recently wrote a post arguing that "drowning children are rare":
Stories such as Peter Singer's "drowning child" hypothetical frequently imply that there is a major funding gap for health interventions in poor countries, such that there is a moral imperative for people in rich-countries to give a large portion of their income to charity. There are simply not enough excess deaths for these claims to be plausible.
As far as I can see, this pretty much destroys the generic utilitarian imperative to live like a monk and give all your excess money to the global poor or something even more urgent. Insofar as there's a way to fix these problems as a low-info donor, there's already enough money. Claims to the contrary are…
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Dec 12, 2021
Announcing the launch of the Happier Lives Institute by MichaelPlant
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This is: Announcing the launch of the Happier Lives Institute, published by MichaelPlant on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Following months of work by a dedicated team of volunteers, I am pleased to announce the launch of the Happier Lives Institute, a new EA organisation which seeks to answer the question: ‘What are the most effective ways we can use our resources to make others happier?’
Summary
The Happier Lives Institute is pioneering a new way of thinking about the central question of effective altruism - how can we benefit others as much as possible? We are approaching this through a ‘happiness lens’, using individuals’ reports of their subjective well-being as the measure of benefit. Adopting this approach indicates potential new priorities, notably that mental health emerges as a large and neglected proble…
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Dec 12, 2021
In praise of unhistoric heroism by rosehadshar
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This is: In praise of unhistoric heroism, published by rosehadshar on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Dorothea Brooke as an example to follow
I once read a post by an effective altruist about how Dorothea Brooke, one of the characters in George Eliot’s Middlemarch, was an EA. There’s definitely something interesting about looking at the story like this, but for me this reading really missed the point when it concluded that Dorothea’s life had been “a tragic failure”.[1] I think that Dorothea’s life was in many ways a triumph of light over darkness, and that her success and not her failure is the thing we should take as a pattern.
Dorothea dreamed big: she wanted to alleviate rural poverty and right the injustice she saw around her. In the end, those schemes came to nothing. She married a Radical MP, and in the pr…
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Dec 12, 2021
Rethink Priorities - 2021 Impact and 2022 Strategy by Peter Wildeford
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This is: Rethink Priorities - 2021 Impact and 2022 Strategy, published by Peter Wildeford on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
Our purpose and people
Rethink Priorities is a research organization that conducts research to inform policymakers and major foundations about how to best help people and nonhuman animals in both the present and the long-term future. Our work informs key stakeholders of the effective altruism community regarding decisions around funding, interventions, and research time allocation worth millions of dollars every year.
This year we hired 14 new people. We now have a staff of 28 people, corresponding to 24.75 full-time equivalents (with 19.75 FTE focused on research and 5 FTE on operations). We’ll have spent about $2.1M USD in 2021.
Our 2021 impact
In 2021, we achieved some tangible impact from our work, such…
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Dec 12, 2021
Update on CEA's EA Grants Program by Nicole_Ross, Centre for Effective Altruism
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This is: Update on CEA's EA Grants Program, published by Nicole_Ross, Centre for Effective Altruism on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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In December, I (Nicole Ross) joined CEA to run the EA Grants program, which gives relatively small grants (usually under $60,000 per grant) to individuals and start-up projects within EA cause areas. Before joining CEA, I worked at the Open Philanthropy Project and GiveWell doing both research and grants operations.
When I joined CEA, the EA Grants program had been running since 2017. Upon my initial review, it had a mixed track record. Some grants seemed quite exciting, some seemed promising, others lacked the information I needed to make an impact judgment, and others raised some concerns.
Additionally, the program had a history of operational and strategic challenges. I've spent the majori…
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Dec 12, 2021
The case for building more and better epistemic institutions in the effective altruism community by stefan.torges
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This is: The case for building more and better epistemic institutions in the effective altruism community, published by stefan.torges on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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As a community, we should think more about how to create and improve our collective epistemic institutions. With that, I mean the formalized ways of creating and organizing knowledge in the community beyond individual blogs and organizations. Examples are online platforms like the EA Forum and Metaculus, events like EA Global and the Leaders Forum, surveys like the EA survey and the survey at the Leaders Forum. This strikes me as a neglected form of community-building that might be particularly high-leverage.
The case for building more and better epistemic institutions
Epistemic progress is crucial for the success of this community.
Effective altruism is abou…
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Dec 12, 2021
Effective Altruism is an Ideology, not (just) a Question by Fods12
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This is: Effective Altruism is an Ideology, not (just) a Question, published by Fods12 on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Introduction
In a widely-cited article on the EA forum, Helen Toner argues that effective altruism is a question, not an ideology. Here is her core argument:
What is the definition of Effective Altruism? What claims does it make? What do you have to believe or do, to be an Effective Altruist?
I don’t think that any of these questions make sense.
It’s not surprising that we ask them: if you asked those questions about feminism or secularism, Islamism or libertarianism, the answers you would get would be relevant and illuminating. Different proponents of the same movement might give you slightly different answers, but synthesising the answers of several people would give you a pr…
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Dec 12, 2021
Review of FHI's Summer Research Fellowship 2020 by rosehadshar
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This is:Review of FHI's Summer Research Fellowship 2020, published by rosehadshar on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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This post reviews the Future of Humanity Institute’s Summer Research Fellowship 2020 in detail. If you’re in a hurry, we recommend reading the summary of activities, lessons learned, and comparing costs and benefits sections for a quicker take.
Thanks to Owen Cotton-Barratt, Max Daniel, Eliana Lorch, Tanya Singh and the summer fellows for reviewing and improving this post.
Summary of activities
27 fellows spent 6 weeks on a remote fellowship programme.
We got ~300 applications and interviewed ~50 people.
Backgrounds ranged from undergraduate students to postdocs.
By default, each fellow had a mentor and worked on a research project (though there were some exceptions, and many fellows also spent significant…
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Dec 12, 2021
Does climate change deserve more attention within EA? by Louis_Dixon
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This is: Does climate change deserve more attention within EA?, published by Louis_Dixon on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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I have been an 80,000 Hours Podcast listener and active in EA for about eighteen months, and I have shifted from a focus on climate change, to animal welfare, and now to x-risk and s-risk, which seem to be highly promising from an EA perspective. Along the way, I wonder if some parts of EA might have underplayed climate change, and if more engagement and content on the topic could be valuable.
While I was thinking about sustainability and ethics, I was frustrated by how limited the coverage of the topic was in the 80,000 Hours Podcast episodes, so I emailed the team. Rob Wiblin responded and suggested that I write up an EA forum post.
Thanks to Alexrjl, John Bachelor, and David Nash for their suggestion…
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Dec 12, 2021
Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets by Ben_Kuhn
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This is: Why and how to start a for-profit company serving emerging markets, published by Ben_Kuhn on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Wave (1) is a for-profit, venture backed startup building cheap, instant money transfer to and within Africa. Since launching in 2015, we’ve become by far the biggest remitter to Kenya and Ghana, saving our users and recipients over $100 million so far. Our biggest source of expected future impact is building mobile money systems within Africa, which will have an orders-of-magnitude bigger impact if it succeeds.
Wave’s mission is to improve the world, not to make money. Despite that, we operate more like a tech company than a social enterprise. Our investors are venture capitalists trying to make a high return, and they hold us to the same standards of growth rate an…
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Dec 12, 2021
Minimal-trust investigations by Holden Karnofsky
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This is: Minimal-trust investigations, published by Holden Karnofsky on the Effective Altruism Forum.
This piece is about the single activity ("minimal-trust investigations") that seems to have been most formative for the way I think.
Most of what I believe is mostly based on trusting other people.
For example:
I brush my teeth twice a day, even though I've never read a study on the effects of brushing one's teeth, never tried to see what happens when I don't brush my teeth, and have no idea what's in toothpaste. It seems like most reasonable-seeming people think it's worth brushing your teeth, and that's about the only reason I do it.
I believe climate change is real and important, and that official forecasts of it are probably reasonably close to the best one can do. I have read a bunch of arguments and counterarguments about this, but…
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Dec 12, 2021
Opinion: Estimating Invertebrate Sentience by Jason Schukraft
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This is: Opinion: Estimating Invertebrate Sentience, published by Jason Schukraft on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Introduction
Between May 2018 and June 2019 Rethink Priorities completed a large project on the subject of invertebrate sentience.[1] We investigated the best methodology to approach the question, outlined some philosophical difficulties inherent in the project, described the features most relevant to invertebrate sentience, compiled the extant scientific literature on the topic, summarized our results, and ultimately produced an invertebrate welfare cause profile. We are currently in the process of identifying concrete interventions to improve invertebrate wellbeing, with a report on the welfare of managed honey bees due out in mid-November and a report on the welfare of farmed snails nearing completion.
One…
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Dec 12, 2021
Donor Lottery Debrief by TimothyTelleenLawton
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This is: Donor Lottery Debrief, published by TimothyTelleenLawton on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Good news, I've finally allocated the rest of the donor lottery funds from the 2016-2017 Donor Lottery (the first one in our community)! It took over 3 years but I'm excited about the two projects I funded. It probably goes without saying, but this post is about an independent project and does not represent CFAR (where I work).
This post contains several updates related to the donor lottery:
My first donation: $25k to The Czech Association for Effective Altruism (CZEA) in 2017
My second (and final) donation: $23.5k to Epidemic Forecasting (EpiFor) in 2020
Looking back on the Donor Lottery
Call for more projects like these to fund
CZEA
My previous comments on the original donor lottery post share the basics of how the first $2…
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Dec 12, 2021
EA Birthday Posts: An Alternative to Fundraisers by kuhanj
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This is: EA Birthday Posts: An Alternative to Fundraisers, published by kuhanj on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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For my birthday earlier this year, I spent a fair amount of time writing an EA-themed birthday post (reproduced at the bottom of this write-up). I think that this post did fairly well - 5 messages and subsequent calls about career plan changes (!), and 170 reactions on Facebook. As such, I'd be excited for more EAs to make similar posts, especially other highly involved university organizers with experience communicating about EA. In this post I share my thought-process for making this birthday post, what I could’ve done differently, some considerations for other EAs interested in doing the same, and the post itself. I’d love to hear feedback on the post and the ideas in this writeup, and similar successful e…
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Dec 12, 2021
Introducing Metaforecast: A Forecast Aggregator and Search Tool by NunoSempere, Ozzie Gooen
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This is: Introducing Metaforecast: A Forecast Aggregator and Search Tool, published by NunoSempere, Ozzie Gooen on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Introduction
The last few years have seen a proliferation of forecasting platforms. These platforms differ in many ways, and provide different experiences, filters, and incentives for forecasters. Some platforms like Metaculus and Hypermind use volunteers with prizes, others, like PredictIt and Smarkets are formal betting markets.
Forecasting is a public good, providing information to the public. While the diversity among platforms has been great for experimentation, it also fragments information, making the outputs of forecasting far less useful. For instance, different platforms ask similar questions using different wordings. The questions may or may not be organized, and the outputs may be di…
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Dec 12, 2021
[New org] Canning What We Give by Louis_Dixon
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This is: [New org] Canning What We Give, published by Louis_Dixon on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Epistemic status: 30% (plus or minus 50%). Further details at the bottom.
In the 2019 EA Cause Prioritisation survey, Global Poverty remains the most popular single cause across the sample as a whole. But after more engagement with EA, around 42% of people change their cause area, and of that, a majority (54%) moved towards the Long Term Future/Catastrophic and Existential Risk Reduction.
While many people find that donations help them stay engaged (and continue to be a great thing to do), there has been much discussion of other ways people can contribute positively.
In thinking about the long-run future, one area of research has been improving human's resilience to disasters. A 2014 paper looked at global refuges, and more recently ALLFED,…
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Dec 12, 2021
My Q1 2019 EA Hotel donation by vipulnaik
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This is: My Q1 2019 EA Hotel donation, published by vipulnaik on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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On March 31, 2019, I donated 3200 GBP to the EA Hotel fundraiser via GoFundMe. The donation cost me $4,306.14 USD. My decision was based mainly on the information in the EA Hotel page and the documents linked from the donations list website page on EA Hotel, which include the recent Effective Altruism Forum posts.
In this post, I describe the reasons that influenced my decision to donate. I didn't draft the post before donating, so some of the elaboration includes aspects that didn't (at least consciously) influence my donation decision.
I limited the time I spent writing the post, and will most likely not be able to respond to comments. But please feel free to comment with your thoughts in response to my post or other comments!…
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Dec 12, 2021
Why Nations Fail and the long-termist view of global poverty by Ben_Kuhn
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This is: Why Nations Fail and the long-termist view of global poverty, published by Ben_Kuhn on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Within the effective altruism community, people often talk about “long-termist” vs “short-termist” worldviews. The official distinction between the two is that short-termists prioritize problems by how they affect people alive today, while long-termists prioritize problems by how they could affect humanity’s entire future trajectory. In practice, people usually treat this as synonymous with prioritizing either existential risk reduction (if long-termist), or scaling up proven global health interventions (if short-termist).
It’s a bit surprising that each worldview should have exactly one favorite cause area, though. Couldn’t you have short-termist work on existen…
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Dec 12, 2021
How are resources in EA allocated across issues? by Benjamin_Todd
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this is: How are resources in EA allocated across issues?, published by Benjamin_Todd on the effective altruism forum.
This is a cross-post from 80,000 Hours.
How are the resources in effective altruism allocated across cause areas?
Knowing these figures, for both funding and labour, can help us spot gaps in the current allocation. In particular, I’ll suggest that broad longtermism seems like the most pressing gap right now.
This is a follow on from my first post, where I estimated the total amount of committed funding and people, and briefly discussed how many resources are being deployed now vs. invested for later.
These estimates are for how the situation stood in 2019. I made them in early 2020, and made a few more adjustments when I wrote this post. As with the previous post, I recommend that readers take these figures as extremel…
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Dec 11, 2021
Frank Feedback Given To Very Junior Researchers by NunoSempere
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this is: Frank Feedback Given To Very Junior Researchers, published by NunoSempere on the effective altruism forum.
Over the last year, I have found myself giving feedback on various drafts, something that I'm generally quite happy to do. Recently, I got to give two variations of this same feedback in quick succession, so I noticed the commonalities, and then realized that these commonalities were also present on past pieces of feedback. I thought I'd write the general template up, in case others might find it valuable.
High level comments
You are working at the wrong level of abstraction and depth / you are biting more than you can chew / being too ambitious.
In particular, the questions that you analyze are likely to have many cruxes, i.e, factors that might change the conclusion completely. But you only identify a few such cruxes, and…
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Dec 11, 2021
Cause profile: mental health by MichaelPlant
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this is: Cause profile: mental health, published by MichaelPlant on the effective altruism forum.
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Introduction
In this piece, I argue that mental illness may be one of the world’s most pressing problems.
Here is a summary of the key points:
Not only does mental illness seem to cause as much, if not more, total worldwide unhappiness than global poverty, it also seems far more neglected.
Effective mental health interventions exist currently. These have been improving over time and we can expect further improvements.
I estimate the cost-effectiveness of a particular mental health organisation, StrongMinds, and claim it is (at least) four times more effective per dollar than GiveDirectly, a GiveWell recommended top charity. This assumes we understand cost-effectiveness in terms of happiness, as measured by self-reported life…
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Dec 11, 2021
Existential Risk and Economic Growth by leopold
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this is: Existential Risk and Economic Growth, published by leopold on the effective altruism forum.
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As a summer research fellow at FHI, I’ve been working on using economic theory to better understand the relationship between economic growth and existential risk. I’ve finished a preliminary draft; see below. I would be very interesting in hearing your thoughts and feedback!
Draft: leopoldaschenbrenner.com/xriskandgrowth
Abstract:
Technological innovation can create or mitigate risks of catastrophes—such as nuclear war, extreme climate change, or powerful artificial intelligence run amok—that could imperil human civilization. What is the relationship between economic growth and these existential risks? In a model of endogenous and directed technical change, with moderate parameters, existential risk follows a Kuznet…
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Dec 11, 2021
Some thoughts on deference and inside-view models by Buck
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this is: Some thoughts on deference and inside-view models, published by Buck on the effective altruism forum.
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TL;DR:
It's sometimes reasonable to believe things based on heuristic arguments, but it's useful to be clear with yourself about when you believe things for heuristic reasons as opposed to having strong arguments that take you all the way to your conclusion.
A lot of the time, I think that when you hear a heuristic argument for something, you should be interested in converting this into the form of an argument which would take you all the way to the conclusion except that you haven't done a bunch of the steps--I think it's healthy to have a map of all the argumentative steps which you haven't done, or which you're taking on faith.
I think that all the above can be combined to form a set of attitudes which are heal…
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Dec 11, 2021
Are there any other pro athlete aspiring EAs? by Marcus Daniell
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this is: Are there any other pro athlete aspiring EAs?, published by Marcus Daniell on the effective altruism forum.
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I'm starting an EA aligned non-profit called High Impact Athletes that is aiming to funnel donations from current and retired pro athletes and their fans towards the most effective orgs in the world.
It's still early stage but I wondered if there were any pro or ex athletes hiding in the EA Forum who might be interested in supporting the idea? I believe pro sport is a relatively untapped space for EA and potentially has huge pulling power if the athletes get their fans on board.
Many thanks,
Marcus Daniell
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Dec 11, 2021
Rethink Priorities 2020 Impact and 2021 Strategy by Marcus_A_Davis
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this is: Rethink Priorities 2020 Impact and 2021 Strategy, published by Marcus_A_Davis on the effective altruism forum.
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Summary
Rethink Priorities is an EA research organization focused on influencing funders and key decision-makers to improve decisions within EA and EA-aligned organizations.
This year we expanded our operations team and hired multiple researchers across multiple causes, allowing us to expand and improve our animal welfare and EA movement building work, and build a dedicated longtermism team.
Rethink Priorities currently has a staff of 16 people, corresponding to 13 full-time equivalents (including 3 FTE operations staff). This year we spent 72% of our time working on research relevant to farmed and wild animal welfare, 9% on movement building, 8% on longtermism, and 11% on other research projects. By the…
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Dec 11, 2021
2017 Donor Lottery Report by AdamGleave
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this is: 2017 Donor Lottery Report, published by AdamGleave on the effective altruism forum.
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I am the winner of the 2017 donor lottery. This write-up documents my decision process. The primary intended audience are other donors: several of the organisations I decided to donate to still have substantial funding gaps. I also expect this to be of interest to individuals considering working for one of the organisations reviewed.
To recap, in a donor lottery many individuals make small contributions. The accumulated sum is then distributed to a randomly selected participant. Your probability of winning is proportional to the amount donated, such that the expected amount of donations you control is the same as the amount you contribute. This is advantageous since the winner (given the extra work, arguably the "loser") of the lot…
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Dec 11, 2021
How to generate research proposals by Jsevillamol
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this is: How to generate research proposals, published by Jsevillamol on the effective altruism forum.
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Epistemic status: The advice I give is based on anecdotic experience, and what works well for me might not transfer well to others, but my past self would have found this article quite useful
As part of the application to FHI’s Summer Fellows Program I had to submit a research proposal, and once I finished my original proposal I had to engage again with the process to select my next research project.
In this article I will explain the particular approach I chose for this task, and provide some commentary on what worked well and what did not.
I expect you will get a lot of mileage out of this article if you are an early career researcher struggling to generate research ideas or if you are considering pursuing a career in…
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Dec 11, 2021
The ITN framework, cost-effectiveness, and cause prioritisation by John G. Halstead
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this is: The ITN framework, cost-effectiveness, and cause prioritisation, published by John G. Halstead on the effective altruism forum.
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From reading EA material, one might get the impression that the Importance, Tractability and Neglectedness (ITN) framework is the (1) only, or (2) best way to prioritise causes. For example, in EA concepts’ two entries on cause prioritisation, the ITN framework is put forward as the only or leading way to prioritise causes. Will MacAskill’s recent TedTalk leaned heavily on the ITN framework as the way to make cause prioritisation decisions. Open Philanthropy Project explicitly prioritises causes using an informal version of the ITN framework.
In this post, I argue that:
Extant versions of the ITN framework are subject to conceptual problems.
A new version of the ITN framework, develop…
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Dec 11, 2021
Coronavirus Research Ideas for EAs
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this is: Coronavirus Research Ideas for EAs, published by Peter Wildeford on the effective altruism forum.
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COVID-19 is a tragedy with more everyday social implications in the developed world than anything since World War II. Many EAs are wondering what, if anything, to do about COVID to help the world. To try to investigate further, I am helping articulate possible research ideas for further discussion and consideration.
The kind of research we need to do in this situation is very different from the kind of research EA is used to doing well. We normally spend several months carefully researching a single topic that doesn’t change very much. With COVID, everything about this is reversed—the situation currently requires us to rapidly get up to speed and produce research in a matter of days in a situation that is rapidly…
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Dec 11, 2021
Introducing Animal Advocacy Africa by AnimalAdvocacyAfrica
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this is: Introducing Animal Advocacy Africa , published by AnimalAdvocacyAfrica on the effective altruism forum.
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We’re excited to introduce a new EA project: Animal Advocacy Africa!
Animal Advocacy Africa (AAA) aims to develop a collaborative and effective animal advocacy movement in Africa. We plan to do this by engaging organisations and individual advocates within farmed animal advocacy in Africa and using this engagement to seek cost-effective opportunities to help animals. We aim to achieve this via a two-stage process:
Six-month research phase: Identifying which barriers are holding the animal advocacy movement back in Africa, and which interventions can most effectively address these barriers. We have contacted organisations in South Africa, Kenya, Tanzania, Nigeria, Ghana, Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Swaziland.
Six-mon…
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Dec 11, 2021
GCRs mitigation: the missing Sustainable Development Goal by AmAristizábal
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this is: GCRs mitigation: the missing Sustainable Development Goal, published by AmAristizábal on the effective altruism forum.
Thanks to Luca Righetti, Elise Bohan, Fin Moorhouse, Max Daniel, Konrad Seifert and Maxime Stauffer for their valuable comments and thoughts on the draft and future steps. Thanks to Owen for telling me to turn this idea into a post!
Summary and introduction
Throughout this post, I will explore some overlaps between sustainability (focusing on Sustainable Development Goals) and longtermism (focusing on Global Catastrophic Risks mitigation).
I wrote this over a two-week period to get some tentative thoughts out. My goal with posting this is to find other people interested in thinking about the intersection of sustainable development and GCRs mitigation as well as to invite feedback for how/if to proceed with rese…
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Dec 11, 2021
Feedback available for EA Forum drafts by Aaron Gertler
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this is: Feedback available for EA Forum drafts, published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum.
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Update, 12/7/21: Given my departure from CEA, I'm no longer sharing feedback.
I recommend the EA Editing and Review group as another option!
If providing feedback to random Forum users sounds fun to you, and you want to take over for me, contact content@centreforeffectivealtruism.org to express your interest. Please include a description of your past writing/editing experience. This was a widely-demanded service, so CEA might be interested in hiring someone to continue it (though I'm not certain about this).
Hello, Forum! This is Aaron, your friendly neighborhood moderator (and a content writer/editor at CEA).
I’m writing this to let you know that I offer a free service as part of my work for CEA: If you want some…
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Dec 11, 2021
Effective Altruism and Free Riding by sbehmer
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this is: Effective Altruism and Free Riding, published by sbehmer on the effective altruism forum.
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I'd like to thank Parker Whitfill, Andrew Kao, Stefan Schubert, and Phil Trammell for very helpful comments. Errors are my own.
Many people have argued that those involved in effective altruism should “be nice”, meaning that they should cooperate when facing prisoner’s dilemma type situations ([1] [2] [3]). While I believe that some of these are convincing arguments, it seems to be underappreciated just how often someone attempting to do good will face prisoner’s dilemmas. Previous authors seem to highlight mostly zero-sum conflict between opposing value systems [3] [4] or common-sense social norms like lying [1]. However, the problem faced by a group of people trying to do good is effectively a public goods problem […
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Dec 11, 2021
3 suggestions about jargon in EA by MichaelA
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this is: 3 suggestions about jargon in EA, published by MichaelA on the effective altruism forum.
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Summary and purpose
I suggest that effective altruists should:
Be careful to avoid using jargon to convey something that isn’t what the jargon is actually meant to convey, and that could be conveyed well without any jargon.
As examples, I’ll discuss misuses I’ve seen of the terms existential risk and the unilateralist’s curse, and the jargon-free statements that could’ve been used instead.
Provide explanations and/or hyperlinks to explanations the first time they use jargon.
Be careful to avoid implying jargon or concepts originated in EA when they did not.
I’m sure similar suggestions have been made before, both within and outside of EA. This post’s purpose is to collect the suggestions together in one post that…
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Dec 11, 2021
Global lead exposure report by DavidBernard, Jason Schukraft
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this is: Global lead exposure report, published by DavidBernard, Jason Schukraft on the effective altruism forum.
Rethink Priorities has been piloting expanding into human-focused neartermist global priorities research. This post is one of three outputs from the pilot program. Open Philanthropy provided funding for this project and we use their general frameworks for evaluating cause areas, but they do not necessarily endorse its conclusions. We don’t intend this report to be Rethink Priorities’ final word on lead exposure. We hope the report galvanizes a productive conversation about lead exposure within the EA community. We are open to revising our views as more information is uncovered.
If you are interested in doing similar research, please apply to Rethink Priorities’ Global Health and Development Staff Researcher position (de…
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Dec 11, 2021
Canva CEO commits at least $6 billion “to do the most good” by 22tom
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this is: Canva CEO commits at least $6 billion “to do the most good”, published by 22tom on the effective altruism forum.
Melanie Perkins, the CEO of Canva, recently announced that they intend to donate the “vast majority of their equity to do good in the world”. This comes out to at least $6 billion. I think this is awesome news and a potentially exciting opportunity for the EA community.
As reported in several media outlets, Canva has recently been valued at $40 billion USD. Following this, Melanie Perkins (Canva’s CEO) outlined in a blog post their vision, through a simple Two-Step plan:
With a $40 billion valuation, Canva has made a lot of progress on step 1. To achieve step 2, Melanie and her husband and co-founder, Cliff, have “committed the vast majority of their equity (30% of Canva) to do good in the world”, throug…
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Dec 11, 2021
2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison by Larks
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this is: 2018 AI Alignment Literature Review and Charity Comparison, published by Larks on the effective altruism forum.
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Cross-posted to LessWrong.
Introduction
Like last year and the year before, I’ve attempted to review the research that has been produced by various organisations working on AI safety, to help potential donors gain a better understanding of the landscape. This is a similar role to that which GiveWell performs for global health charities, and somewhat similar to an securities analyst with regards to possible investments. It appears that once again no-one else has attempted to do this, to my knowledge, so I've once again undertaken the task.
This year I have included several groups not covered in previous years, and read more widely in the literature.
My aim is basically to judge the output of each organi…
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Dec 11, 2021
Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent by saulius
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this is: Corporate campaigns affect 9 to 120 years of chicken life per dollar spent, published by saulius on the effective altruism forum.
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Summary
In this article, I estimate how many chickens will be affected by corporate cage-free[1] and broiler welfare[2] commitments won by all charities, in all countries, during all the years between 2005 and the end of 2018. According to my estimate, for every dollar spent, 9 to 120 years of chicken life will be affected. However, the estimate doesn't take into account indirect effects which could be more important.
The estimate is summarized in the table below.[3] In the table, everything is expressed in my subjective 90% confidence intervals. Numbers in parentheses are means. M stands for million, and B stands for billion. The full estimation can be seen in the Guesstimate model. Nu…
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Dec 11, 2021
What to know before talking with journalists about EA by sky
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this is: What to know before talking with journalists about EA, published by sky on the effective altruism forum.
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Journalists regularly contact individuals, groups, and organizations who are involved in the effective altruism space. At first glance, opportunities to speak with journalists may seem like a good way to spread information about important work and ideas. However, we have found that they can also be a good way to create misunderstandings or negative impressions of EA or of particular projects. Because evaluating and engaging in successful media engagements requires specialized skills and knowledge, it’s important to seek advice or resources, proceed carefully, and be prepared.
Quick takeaway: when you are contacted by the media, we think it’s important that you connect with resources and advisors so you can…
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Dec 11, 2021
Intervention Profile: Ballot Initiatives by Jason Schukraft
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this is: Intervention Profile: Ballot Initiatives, published by Jason Schukraft on the effective altruism forum.
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Executive summary
Ballot initiatives are a form of direct democracy in which citizens can gather signatures to qualify a proposed piece of legislation for the ballot, which is then subject to a binding up-or-down vote by the general electorate. Ballot initiatives are possible in Switzerland, Taiwan, many U.S. states and cities, and elsewhere. Ballot initiatives appear to maintain several advantages over more traditional policy lobbying, including lower barriers to entry and more direct control over the final legislation. However, the ultimate cost-effectiveness of a ballot initiative campaign depends on several factors, many of which are difficult to specify precisely. Although ballot initiatives hold enough pro…
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Dec 11, 2021
Illegible impact is still impact by G Gordon Worley III
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this is: Illegible impact is still impact, published by G Gordon Worley III on the effective altruism forum.
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In EA we focus a lot on legible impact. At a tactical level, it's the thing that often separates EA from other altruistic efforts. Unfortunately I think this focus on impact legibility, when taken to extremes and applied in situations where it doesn't adequately account for value, leads to bad outcomes for EA and the world as a whole.
Legibility is the idea that only what can easily be explained and measured within a model matters. Anything that doesn't fit neatly in the model is therefore illegible.
In the case of impact, legible impact is that which can be measured easily in ways that a model predicts is correlated with outcomes. Examples of legible impact measures for altruistic efforts include counterfactual liv…
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Dec 11, 2021
A central directory for open research questions by MichaelA
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this is: A central directory for open research questions, published by MichaelA on the effective altruism forum.
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Quite wonderfully, there has been a proliferation of research questions EAs have identified as potentially worth pursuing, and now even a proliferation of collections of such questions. So like a good little EA, I’ve gone meta: this post is a collection of all such collections I’m aware of. I hope this can serve as a central directory to all of those other useful resources, and thereby help interested EAs find questions they can investigate to help inform our whole community’s efforts to do good better.
Some things to note:
It may be best to just engage with one set of questions that are relevant to your skills, interests, or plans, and ignore the rest of this post.
It’s possible that some of these quest…
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Dec 11, 2021
Concern, and hope by willbradshaw
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this is: Concern, and hope, published by willbradshaw on the effective altruism forum.
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I am worried.
The last month or so has been very emotional for a lot of people in the community, culminating in the Slate Star Codex controversy of the past two weeks. On one side, we've had multiple posts talking about the risks of an incipient new Cultural Revolution; on the other, we've had someone accuse a widely-admired writer associated with the movement of abetting some pretty abhorrent worldviews. At least one prominent member of an EA org I know, someone I deeply respect, deleted their Forum account this week. I expect there are more I don't know about.
Both groups feel like they and their sacred values are under attack. Both groups are increasingly commenting anonymously or from throwaway accounts, and seeing their comments mas…
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Dec 11, 2021
Make a $10 donation into $35 by WilliamKiely
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this is: Make a $10 donation into $35, published by WilliamKiely on the effective altruism forum.
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Update March 2021: This donation match appears to be available indefinitely.
Facebook's Giving Tuesday donation match ran out quickly this morning, but here's one that's still available:
Every.org will donate $25 to any 501(c)(3) nonprofit up to $250,000 in total for each new referred user who donates $10 or more. This works out to a 250% counterfactual match on $10 in donations--higher than Facebook's, just with a lower limit.
Steps:
Join with:/@william.kiely/
Donate $10 to a nonprofit of your choice.
Receive $25 in credit immediately.
Donate the $25 you received to a nonprofit of your choice.
I'd recommend just donating via card to save on time, rather than connect your bank account which would save on fees.
The whole proces…
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Dec 11, 2021
Early Alpha Version of the Probably Good Website by omernevo, sella
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this is: Early Alpha Version of the Probably Good Website, published by omernevo, sella on the effective altruism forum.
TL;DR
We have launched a preliminary (alpha) website for Probably Good.
The long-term goal of this effort is to provide EA-aligned career advice in a way that’s engaging, relevant and useful to people with a diverse range of views, backgrounds and circumstances. For more details see our original announcement.
As can be clearly seen in the site - this is an early version, which we are sharing here mainly to receive feedback, which you can give here in the comments or through the website's feedback page.
Any feedback - including on content, style, prioritization or typos - would be greatly appreciated.
Details
Three months ago, we announced Probably Good - a new career guidance organization aimed at filling existing ga…
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Dec 11, 2021
Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is not necessary for population ethics: new many-author collaboration by deanspears
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this is: Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is not necessary for population ethics: new many-author collaboration, published by deanspears on the effective altruism forum.
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29 economists and philosophers, including leading researchers published today in Utilitas: “avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion is not a necessary condition for a minimally adequate... approach to population ethics.” The link at the top of this post is to my own summary of the article and how we reached it, posted at Medium.
Population ethics asks how to evaluate policies and social trends that change the size of the global population. For decades, research has focused on whether to accept “the Repugnant Conclusion.” The Repugnant Conclusion is a hypothetical claim about how to compare populations of well-off people against imaginable, enorm…
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Dec 11, 2021
What EA projects could grow to become megaprojects, eventually spending $100m per year? by Nathan Young
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this is: What EA projects could grow to become megaprojects, eventually spending $100m per year?, published by by Nathan Youngon the effective altruism forum.
Ben Todd (CEO of 80,000 Hours) says "Effective altruism needs more 'megaprojects'. Most projects in the community are designed to use up to ~$10m per year effectively, but the increasing funding overhang means we need more projects that could deploy ~$100m per year."
What are some $100m projects that you think might be worth consideration?
By megaproject, I'm referring to any project that could eventually be scaled up to $100 million, not ones that are planned from the start to cost $100 million. In many cases, this could include very small efforts that would have to achieve multiple levels of success to eventually get $100Million+ per year.
thanks for listening. to help us out wit…
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Dec 11, 2021
The Explanatory Obstacle of EA by GidonKadosh
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This is: The Explanatory Obstacle of EA, published by GidonKadosh on the Effective Altruism Forum.
This post discusses multiple issues relating to the way the EA movement is perceived (ranging from common misconceptions to unjustified strong opinions against EA) and suggests alternatives to the ways we describe EA.
Since I don’t have the resources to quantify this problem, I rely on my personal experience as a community builder and that of many other community builders and explain the rationale behind my suggestions.
Around 2013, a couple of mass media articles about EA (1,2,3) - specifically about Earning To Give - were published. These articles clearly missed most of the nuances behind the idea of Earning To Give, and heavily misrepresented the idea.
In light of such events, the EA movement at that time faced a critical question:
Sho…
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Dec 11, 2021
On fringe ideas by Kelsey Piper
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This is: On fringe ideas, published by Kelsey Piper on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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This is a linkpost for
The Forum team published this with Kelsey's permission. We've slightly edited the original content, which you can find here.
Question to the blog
What do you think about the more fringe parts of EA?
I get really angry seeing people call themselves EAs but then spending all of their time writing speculative essays on, say (to quote those I came across most recently), how actually wildlife conservation is bad because animals in the wild suffer. Like, it's fun to think about that, but my goals as an EA are very different than those of someone who thinks stuff like that is even comparable with global development or long-term sustainability.
But I do wonder what your opinion is, since you do have a record of being sensibl…
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Dec 11, 2021
How I got an entry-level role in Congress by new_staffer
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This is: How I got an entry-level role in Congress, published new_staffer on the Effective Altruism Forum.
A few months ago I was hired for an entry-level role in a Congressional office. In this post I will share my job search and application process.
I hope this will be helpful to people who are considering Congressional work as a career option. Because I am early in my career, I imagine this will be most helpful/applicable for people who are in undergrad or earlier.
Note: I’m intentionally keeping this post anonymous. If you have any questions, please comment them here and I will do my best to answer them. If you’d like to connect further, feel free to send me a private message through the EA Forum.
My Specific Experience
Context about myself as an applicant:
I earned an undergraduate social science major at a relatively prestigiou…
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Dec 11, 2021
Will companies meet their animal welfare commitments? by saulius
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This is: Will companies meet their animal welfare commitments? , published by saulius on the Effective Altruism Forum.
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Summary
Multiple animal organisations are now focusing on securing corporate commitments to improve animal welfare. And they have been very successful: Chicken Watch lists 1672 such commitments, 1007 of which are set to be fulfilled between 2020 and 2026. However, there is some reason to worry that some of these commitments may be broken:
Some industry sources doubt whether U.S. cage-free commitments will be fully met. Insufficient consumer demand and lack of funds led to producers slowing down or even shutting down their cage-free conversion plans. What is more, only 27% of U.S. companies included in CIWF’s EggTrack report disclosed their progress towards cage-free commitments.
So far, most animal welfa…
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Dec 11, 2021
Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning by Ajeya
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This is: Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning, published by Ajeya on the Effective Altruism Forum.
This is a linkpost for/
(This is a guest post on Holden Karnofsky's Cold Takes blog, written by Ajeya Cotra.)
Holden previously mentioned the idea that advanced AI systems (e.g. PASTA) may develop dangerous goals that cause them to deceive or disempower humans. This might sound like a pretty out-there concern. Why would we program AI that wants to harm us? But I think it could actually be a difficult problem to avoid, especially if advanced AI is developed using deep learning (often used to develop state-of-the-art AI today).
In deep learning, we don’t program a computer by hand to do a task. Loosely speaking, we instead search for a computer program (called a model) that does the task well. We usually know very little…
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Dec 11, 2021
The academic contribution to AI safety seems large by technicalities
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This is: The academic contribution to AI safety seems large, published by technicalities on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary: I model the contribution to AI safety by academics working in adjacent areas. I argue that this contribution is at least on the same order as the EA bet, and seek a lower bound. Guesstimates here and here. I focus on present levels of academic work, but the trend is even more important.
Confidence: High in a notable contribution, low in the particular estimates. Lots of Fermi estimates.
A big reason for the EA focus on AI safety is its neglectedness:
...less than $50 million per year is devoted to the field of AI safety or work specifically targeting global catastrophic biorisks.
80,000 Hours (2019)
...we estimate fewer than 100 people in the world are working on how to make AI safe.
80,000 Hours (2017)
Grand…
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Dec 11, 2021
Some thoughts on EA outreach to high schoolers by Buck
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This is: Some thoughts on EA outreach to high schoolers , published by Buck on the Effective Altruism Forum.
[A bunch of these points came from Claire Zabel. Thanks to various people who provided feedback.]
TL;DR: I think that lots of EAs have updated against outreach to high school students based on evidence that isn’t actually entirely relevant. I also think that there are some reasons to think that outreach to high school students could be competitive with outreach to undergraduates. There are a variety of downsides to outreach targeting younger people, none of which seem decisive to me.
EAs seem to be too pessimistic about high school outreach
There have been several posts about unsuccessful (according to the authors) attempts to get high schoolers into EA. E.g. see here and here. When I’ve talked to people about different recrui…
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Dec 11, 2021
Introducing the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI) by maxime, konrad
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This is: Introducing the Simon Institute for Longterm Governance (SI), published by maxime, konrad on the Effective Altruism Forum.
(Konrad Seifert & Maxime Stauffer) have the pleasure to announce the Simon[1] Institute for Longterm Governance (SI):
simoninstitute.ch
The website caters to our initial target audience of international policymakers. This post introduces our theory of change and provides additional information relevant to the EA community and potential funders. The following is structured into:
An overview of SI
Key decisions we made in founding SI and underlying assumptions
An overview of the value SI provides to the EA community
Call for support
How to get in touch
Ask us anything
We thank Nora Ammann, Haydn Belfield, Ollie Base, Michael Aird, Devon Fritz, Rumtin Sepasspour, Christine Peterson, Julia Wise and Helen Toner f…
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Dec 11, 2021
Thoughts on being overqualified for EA positions by Ben_West
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This is: Thoughts on being overqualified for EA positions, published by Ben_West on the Effective Altruism Forum.
I sometimes hear of people not wanting to work for EA organizations out of a fear that they are "overqualified". I believe the reasoning is something like:
In the for-profit sector, projects with some characteristics (e.g. building a website with less than 100k pageviews/day) are usually done by more junior people.
This is presumably because it's not cost-effective to hire more senior staff (i.e. the value senior staff add to the project is less than the extra cost of hiring them).
Projects in EA organizations have these characteristics.
Therefore, there is not enough benefit for it to be worth having senior people do these tasks in EA organizations over having junior people do them.
I think (3) is not justified for a few rea…
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Dec 11, 2021
English as a dominant language in the movement: challenges and solutions by Dobroslawa_Gogloza
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This is: English as a dominant language in the movement: challenges and solutions, published by Dobroslawa_Gogloza on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Many of the problems we are facing are global, so the social movements that we have to create in response to them must also be global. To facilitate cooperation within any movement, we also need a common language. It is very good that we have a language that makes it easy for activists from different parts of the world to share information, learn from each other and plan strategies together. However, we must also be aware that the use of a single language of communication has certain consequences for the dynamics and power structures of our social movement.
There are many studies that analyze differences in the perception of native-speakers of a language compared to a second language or forei…
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Dec 11, 2021
EA Survey 2019 Series: How EAs Get Involved in EA by David_Moss
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This is: EA Survey 2019 Series: How EAs Get Involved in EA, published by David_Moss on the Effective Altruism Forum.
Summary
Personal Contacts (14%), LessWrong (9.6%) and 80,000 Hours (9.6%) are still the main ways most people have heard of EA over time.
In recent years (2018-2019), 80,000 Hours (17%) is the single largest source for people first hearing about EA, followed by Personal Contacts (15%).
80,000 Hours (47.8%), GiveWell (42.7%) and Personal Contact (34.8%) had the highest percentages of EAs saying they were important for getting them involved in EA.
We find few differences in the proportion of highly engaged EAs first hearing of EA from different sources, except for significantly higher proportions of engaged EAs first hearing of EA from a personal contact or a local group.
Additionally, for the first time, we provide data abo…
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Dec 11, 2021
A new, cause-general career planning process by Benjamin_Todd
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This is: A new, cause-general career planning process , published by Benjamin_Todd on the AI Alignment Forum.
We just released a new resource, which may become an important part of our site, and which might help reduce some cultural issues in the EA community.
As a little background, 80,000 Hours has always aimed to provide two types of advice:
Information about specific problems and career paths and their impact
General strategies & decision-making tips for high-impact careers, such as steps for how to compare two jobs, or whether to focus on career capital or immediate impact.
The key ideas page we released in April 2019 emphasised specific problems & paths over general advice, but it was always our intention to fill in our coverage of both (similarly to how the 2017 career guide covered both).
I think we’ve taken a big step towards…
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Dec 11, 2021
Ending The War on Drugs - A New Cause For Effective Altruists? by MichaelPlant
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This is: Ending The War on Drugs - A New Cause For Effective Altruists?, published by MichaelPlant on the Effective Altruism Forum
This is a linkpost for
Peter Singer and I argue for drug legalisation in an article that was published in the New Statesman earlier this week (link to my tweet). In short, we argue 'War on Drugs' has failed and it's time that governments, not gangsters, run the drug market.
I posted what follows below in the EA facebook group and was encouraged to do so here too (as the discussion is often better).
The aim of the article wasn't to make an argument in 'EA terms': we merely claimed that moving from drug prohibition to drug legalisation would be a good thing, not that putting money or time put towards this would be (for someone) the most good they could do.
However, I would like to elaborate on the article and s…
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Dec 11, 2021
Long-Term Future Fund: May 2021 grant recommendations by abergal
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This is: Long-Term Future Fund: May 2021 grant recommendations, published by abergal on the AI Alignment Forum.
Introduction
Since November, we’ve made 27 grants worth a total of $1,650,795 (with the expectation that we will get up to $220,000 back), reserved $26,500 for possible later spending, and referred two grants worth a total of $120,000 to private funders. We anticipate being able to spend $3–8 million this year (up from $1.4 million spent in all of 2020). To fill our funding gap, we’ve applied for a $1–1.5 million grant from the Survival and Flourishing Fund, and we hope to receive more funding from small and large longtermist donors.
The composition of the fund has changed since our last grant round. The new regular fund team consists of Asya Bergal (chair), Adam Gleave, and Oliver Habryka, though we may take on additio…
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Dec 11, 2021
This Can't Go On by Holden Karnofsky
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This is: This Can't Go On, published by Holden Karnofsky on the effective altruism forum.
Audio version available at Cold Takes (or search Stitcher, Spotify, Google Podcasts, etc. for "Cold Takes Audio")
This piece starts to make the case that we live in a remarkable century, not just a remarkable era. Previous pieces in the series talked about the strange future that could be ahead of us eventually (maybe 100 years, maybe 100,000).
Summary of this piece:
We're used to the world economy growing a few percent per year. This has been the case for many generations.
However, this is a very unusual situation. Zooming out to all of history, we see that growth has been accelerating; that it's near its historical high point; and that it's faster than it can be for all that much longer (there aren't enough atoms in the galaxy to sustain this rate…
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Dec 11, 2021
Independent impressions by MichaelA
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This is: Independent impressions, published by MichaelA on the effective altruism forum.
Your independent impression about something is essentially what you'd believe about that thing if you weren't updating your beliefs in light of peer disagreement - i.e., if you weren't taking into account your knowledge about what other people believe and how trustworthy their judgement seems on this topic. Your independent impression can take into account the reasons those people have for their beliefs (inasmuch as you know those reasons), but not the mere fact that they believe what they believe.
Meanwhile, your all-things-considered belief can (and probably should!) also take into account peer disagreement.
Armed with this concept, I try to stick to the following epistemic/discussion norms, and I think it's good for other people to do so as well:…
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Dec 11, 2021
How we promoted EA at a large tech company by ParthThaya
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This is: How we promoted EA at a large tech company, published by ParthThaya on the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for/@parth.thaya/how-we-promoted-effective-altruism-at-a-large-tech-company-e8cb8c2149ba
tl;dr
Large tech companies employ hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom are financially well-off and want to help the world, but who are not aware of the effective altruism movement. Because there are already many EA folks working at these companies, and because many of these companies already have the culture and infrastructure to encourage/promote giving (ex. events, donation matching), this presents a huge opportunity to promote and build an EA mindset at these companies.
Introduction
GiveWell believes their best approach to finding more donors is to reach more people who are demographically similar to their curr…
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Dec 11, 2021
Health and happiness research topics—Part 1: Background on QALYs and DALYs by Derek
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This is: Health and happiness research topics—Part 1: Background on QALYs and DALYs, published by Derek on the effective altruism forum.
Sequence contents
Background on QALYs and DALYs
The HALY+: Improving preference-based health metrics
The sHALY: Developing subjective wellbeing-based health metrics
The WELBY (i): Measuring states worse than dead
The WELBY (ii): Establishing cardinality
The WELBY (iii): Capturing spillover effects
The WELBY (iv): Other measurement challenges
Applications in effective altruism
Applications outside effective altruism
Conclusions
Sequence summary
Note: As many of the posts have not yet been completed, I may edit this summary to reflect the final content.
This series of posts describes some of the metrics commonly used to evaluate health interventions and estimate the burden of disease, explains some prob…
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Dec 11, 2021
2-week summer course in economic theory and global prioritization: LMK if interested! by trammell
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This is: 2-week summer course in economic theory and global prioritization: LMK if interested!, published by trammell on the effective altruism forum.
Background: I'm an economics DPhil student at Oxford and research associate at GPI.
I thought some people might find it valuable if I organized a 2-week course, at the beginning or end of next summer (to avoid overlap with internships/etc), on methods and topics in economic theory that
seem especially useful for "global priorities research" purposes,
aren't necessarily covered by a standard undergrad or grad economics curriculum, and
I happen to know about.
It would take 10-25 students, primarily late-stage undergrads or early-stage grad students in economics. It would be in person, with lectures and problem sets and all the rest of it. If it goes well, it might serve as a basis for develo…
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Dec 11, 2021
A practical guide to long-term planning – and suggestions for longtermism by weeatquince
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This is: A practical guide to long-term planning – and suggestions for longtermism, published by weeatquince on the effective altruism forum.
Over the last two years I have been researching and advising numerous government officials on how to do long-term thinking well. Now you are probably not going to be shocked to hear me say it but: making long-term decisions is difficult. Most institutions don’t do it very well and the feedback loops to tell us what works are, as you would expect, long. Yet, that said, it is neither a new challenge nor an uncommon challenge. Many groups of people have faced this problem before and developed tools, strategies and approaches that seem to be working. I have been trying to pull all of this together to paint a rough picture of what best practice in long-term thinking looks like, and advise government…
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Dec 11, 2021
Can the EA community copy Teach for America? (Looking for Task Y) by alexrjl
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This is: Can the EA community copy Teach for America? (Looking for Task Y) , published by alexrjl on the effective altruism forum.
Summary (edited in)
Below, I make the case for the importance of thinking about "Task Y", a way in which people who are interested in EA ideas can usefully help, without moving full time into an EA career. The most useful way in which I am now thinking about "Task Y" is as an answer to the question "What can I do to help?".
Motivation & introduction to Task Y
Episode 10 of the 80000hours podcast was recently re-aired, and one part of the conversation really stayed with me as I listened, and prompted me to ask a question. I've bolded the part I'm referring to for emphasis, but included a much longer quote for context.
Robert Wiblin: A question that often comes up is whether Effective Altruism should aim to be…
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Dec 11, 2021
[updated] Global development interventions are generally more effective than climate change interventions by HaukeHillebrandt
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This is: [updated] Global development interventions are generally more effective than climate change interventions, published by HaukeHillebrandt on the effective altruism forum.
Previously titled “Climate change interventions are generally more effective than global development interventions”. Because of an error the conclusions have significantly changed. [old version]. I have extended the analysis and now provide a more detailed spreadsheet model below. In the comments below, Benjamin_Todd uses a different guesstimate model and found the climate change came out ~80x better than global health (even though the point estimate found that global health is better).
Word count: ~1800
Reading time: ~9 mins
Keywords: Climate change, climate policy, global development, global health, cause prioritization, prioritization research, comparing…
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Dec 11, 2021
Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/Summer 2019 by Ben_West, Centre for Effective Altruism
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This is: Summary of Core Feedback Collected by CEA in Spring/Summer 2019, published by Ben_West, Centre for Effective Altruism on the effective altruism forum.
Introduction
The Centre for Effective Altruism (CEA) aims to grow and maintain the Effective Altruism (EA) movement. As part of that work, it is important for us to understand the needs, values, and concerns of members of the EA community.
CEA collects feedback from community members in a variety of ways (see “CEA’s Feedback Process” below). In the spring and summer of 2019, we reached out to about a dozen people who work in senior positions in EA-aligned organizations to solicit their feedback. We were particularly interested to get their take on execution, communication, and branding issues in EA. Despite this focus, the interviews were open-ended and tended to cover the a…
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Dec 11, 2021
Institutions for Future Generations by tylermjohn
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This is: Institutions for Future Generations, published by tylermjohn on the effective altruism forum.
Given the plausibility of longtermism, many effective altruists are interested in identifying tractable ways to shape the very long-term future for the better. One neglected and potentially tractable way to vastly improve the value of the long-term future is by identifying future-beneficial political and economic institutions and policies and acting to increase the probability of their implementation at various levels of political organization. Will MacAskill recently advocated age-weighted voting as one such strategy for better-aligning the interests of governments with the interests of future generations to improve the value of the future. We can in principle imagine many more, and potentially more promising design and policy proposal…
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Dec 11, 2021
EA Leaders Forum: Survey on EA priorities (data and analysis) by Aaron Gertler
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This is: EA Leaders Forum: Survey on EA priorities (data and analysis), published by Aaron Gertler on the effective altruism forum.
Thanks to Alexander Gordon-Brown, Amy Labenz, Ben Todd, Jenna Peters, Joan Gass, Julia Wise, Rob Wiblin, Sky Mayhew, and Will MacAskill for assisting in various parts of this project, from finalizing survey questions to providing feedback on the final post.
Clarification on pronouns: “We” refers to the group of people who worked on the survey and helped with the writeup. “I” refers to me; I use it to note some specific decisions I made about presenting the data and my observations from attending the event.
This post is the second in a series of posts where we aim to share summaries of the feedback we have received about our own work and about the effective altruism community more generally. The first…
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Dec 11, 2021
Community vs Network
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This is: Community vs Network, published by DavidNash on the effective altruism forum.
Intro
In this post I’m looking at how much focus we should place on the wider network of people interested in effective altruism versus highly engaged members.
The Centre for Effective Altruism has a funnel model describing their focus on contributors and core members as well as people moving down the funnel. I think this has often been interpreted by group organisers as the idea that engagement is key although that is seen as an open question in CEA’s three-factor model of community building. This means people often link engagement to impact, thinking that those who are more involved in the community, go to lots of events or work at EA related organisations are having more impact and so put on events and tailor content towards those activities.
It…
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Dec 11, 2021
How to run a high-energy reading group by tessa
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This is: How to run a high-energy reading group, published by tessa on the effective altruism forum.
Why are reading groups and journal clubs bad so often?
I think there are two reasons: boring readings and low-energy discussions. This post is about how to avoid those pitfalls.
The problem
I have participated in (and organized) some really bad reading groups. This is a shame, because I love a good reading group. They cause me to read more things and read them more carefully. A great group discussion will give me way more than I’d get just by taking notes on a reading.
This is what a bad reading group looks like: six people gather around a table. Two kind of skimmed the reading, and two didn’t read it at all. No one knows quite what to talk about. Someone ventures a, “so, what surprised you about the paper?” Another person flips t…
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Dec 11, 2021
Hiring engineers and researchers to help align GPT-3 by Paul_Christiano
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This is: Hiring engineers and researchers to help align GPT-3, published by Paul_Christiano on the effective altruism forum.
My team at OpenAI, which works on aligning GPT-3, is hiring ML engineers and researchers. Apply here for the ML engineer role and here for the ML researcher role.
GPT-3 is similar enough to "prosaic" AGI that we can work on key alignment problems without relying on conjecture or speculative analogies. And because GPT-3 is already being deployed in the OpenAI API, its misalignment matters to OpenAI’s bottom line — it would be much better if we had an API that was trying to help the user instead of trying to predict the next word of text from the internet.
I think this puts our team in a great place to have an impact:
If our research succeeds I think it will directly reduce existential risk from AI. This is not m…
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Dec 11, 2021
Problem area report: Pain by Sid Sharma
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This is: Problem area report: Pain, published by Sid Sharma on the effective altruism forum.
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Authors: Sid Sharma, Clare Donaldson, Michael Plant[1] [2]
This is a cross-post from the Happier Lives Institute
Executive summary
We all expect to experience some pain in our lives. For most of us, especially those in high-income countries, these experiences will be mild, bearable, and short. Others are not so fortunate. Millions suffer excruciating pain. Millions more suffer moderate or severe pain. They suffer despite the fact that cheap and effective treatments exist.
This report briefly discusses the measurement of pain then explores three major causes of pain and what might be done to relieve them. The findings are relevant for individuals and organisations considering if and how to put their resources (i.e. their money and/o…
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Dec 11, 2021
Which World Gets Saved by trammell
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This is: Which World Gets Saved, published by trammell on the effective altruism forum.
It is common to argue for the importance of x-risk reduction by emphasizing the immense value that may exist over the course of the future, if the future comes. Famously, for instance, Nick Bostrom calculates that, even under relatively sober estimates of the number and size of future human generations, "the expected value of reducing existential risk by a mere one millionth of one percentage point is at least a hundred times the value of a million human lives".
[Note: People sometimes use the term "x-risk" to refer to slightly different things. Here, I use the term to refer to an event that would bring the value of future human civilization to roughly zero—an extinction event, a war in which we bomb ourselves back to the Stone Age and get stuck the…
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Dec 11, 2021
Longtermism' by William_MacAskill
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This is: Longtermism', published William_MacAskill on the effective altruism forum.
This post discusses the introduction and definition of the term ‘longtermism’. Thanks to Toby Ord, Matthew van der Merwe and Hilary Greaves for discussion.
[Edit, Nov 2021: After many discussions, I've settled on the following informal definition:
Longtermism is the view that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time.
This is what I'm going with for What We Owe The Future.
With this in hand, I call strong longtermism is the view that positively influencing the longterm future is the key moral priority of our time. It turns out to be suprisingly difficult to define this precisely, but Hilary and I give it our best shot in our paper.]
Up until recently, there was no name for the cluster of views that involved concern…
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Dec 11, 2021
Concerning the Recent 2019-Novel Coronavirus Outbreak by Matthew_Barnett
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This is: Concerning the Recent 2019-Novel Coronavirus Outbreak, published by Matthew_Barnett on the effective altruism forum.
Update: Most information presented here is out of date. See the 80,000 hours page for more up-to-date information.
I have been researching the Wuhan Coronavirus for several hours today, and I have come to the tentative conclusion that the situation is worse than I initially thought.
Given my current understanding, it now seems reasonable to assign a non-negligible probability (>2%) to the proposition that the current outbreak will result in a global disaster (>50 million deaths resulting from the pathogen within 1 year). I understand this prediction will sound alarmist, but in this post I will outline some of the reasons why I have come to this conclusion.
I now believe that it is warranted for effective altruists…
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Dec 11, 2021
What FHI’s Research Scholars Programme is like: views from scholars by rosehadshar
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This is: What FHI’s Research Scholars Programme is like: views from scholars, published by rosehadshar on the effective altruism forum.
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FHI’s Research Scholars Programme (RSP) has now been running for just under two years, and we’re excited to have launched applications for a third cohort of research scholars.
In this post, I (RSP’s project manager) want to share some scholars’ responses to a series of prompts about RSP, in their own words. I’ve removed some prompts where there weren’t many responses or I didn’t think they’d be very helpful, and sometimes lightly edited the responses for clarity.
Each scholar’s experience of RSP is different, and this sample (~11 out of 19 scholars) probably isn’t representative; but I hope it will give an illustrative idea of what RSP can be like to those who are int…
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Dec 11, 2021
Can my self-worth compare to my instrumental value? by C Tilli
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his is: Can my self-worth compare to my instrumental value?, published by C Tilli on the effective altruism forum.
A personal reflection on how my experience of EA is similar to my experience of religious faith in that it provides a sense of purpose and belonging, but that I miss the assurance of my own intrinsic value and how that can make it difficult to maintain a stable sense of self-worth.
Note: I realize that my experience of religion and faith is probably different from that of a lot of other people. My aim is not to get into a discussion of what religion does right or wrong, especially since I am no longer religious.
I grew up with a close connection to my local church and was rather religious until my mid-late teenage years. I am now in my thirties and have been involved with the EA movement for a couple of years. To me, there…
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Dec 11, 2021
Response to Phil Torres’ ‘The Case Against Longtermism’ by HaydnBelfield
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This is: Response to Phil Torres’ ‘The Case Against Longtermism’, published by HaydnBelfield on the effective altruism forum.
This short post responds to some of the criticisms of longtermism in Torres’ minibook: Were the Great Tragedies of History “Mere Ripples”? The Case Against Longtermism, which I came across in this syllabus.
I argue that while many of the criticisms of Bostrom strike true, newer formulations of longtermism and existential risk – most prominently Ord’s The Precipice (but also Greaves, MacAskill, etc) – do not face the same challenges. I split the criticisms into two sections: the first on problematic ethical assumptions or commitments, the second on problematic policy proposals.
Note that I both respect and disagree with all three authors. Torres piece is insightful and thought-provoking, as well a…
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Dec 11, 2021
Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians by Stefan_Schubert, Lucius_Caviola
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This is: Virtues for Real-World Utilitarians, published by Stefan_Schubert, Lucius_Caviola on the effective altruism forum.
This is a linkpost for
In this paper, we argue that utilitarians who try to act on utilitarianism in the real world face many psychological obstacles, ranging from selfishness to moral biases to limits to epistemic and instrumental rationality. To overcome the most important of these obstacles, utilitarians need to cultivate a number of virtues. We argue that utilitarians should prioritize six virtues.
Moderate altruism - to set aside some of their resources for others.
Moral expansiveness - to care about distant beneficiaries.
Effectiveness-focus - to prioritize the most effective interventions.
Truth-seeking - to overcome epistemic biases to find those effective interventions.
Collaborativeness - to engage in frui…
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Dec 11, 2021
EA Global Tips: Networking with others in mind by kuhanj
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This is: EA Global Tips: Networking with others in mind, published by kuhanj on the effective altruism forum.
Summary/Context:
EAs tend to be pretty good at thinking about people other than themselves. One situation in which I don’t see this as much is when networking, where I've seen people largely focus on their careers/questions+uncertainties/projects/funding opportunities/etc.
EA Global London 2021 is a day away, and many attendees are searching for attendees to schedule meetings with (which I, and many others, usually strongly recommend over attending recorded sessions, and most other sessions too). I thought now (or more accurately a few days ago, oops) might be a good time to write down some thoughts on:
the importance and benefits of coordination in communities with shared goals like the EA community.
the implications of this f…
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Dec 11, 2021
Defining Effective Altruism by William_MacAskill
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This is: Defining Effective Altruism, published by William_MacAskillon the effective altruism forum.
Hilary Greaves and Theron Pummer have put together an excellent collection of essays on effective altruism, which will be coming out soon.
Effective altruism is still widely misunderstood in academia, so I took the opportunity to write up my thoughts on how effective altruism should be defined and why, and to respond to some of the most common misconceptions about effective altruism. I hope that having a precise definition will also help guard against future dilution or drift of the concept, or confusion regarding what effective altruism is about. You can find the essay (with some typos that will be corrected) here. Below I’ve put together an abridged version, highlighting the points that I’d expect to be most interesting for the Foru…
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Dec 11, 2021
Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering
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This is: Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain: Rating, Ranking, and Comparing Peak Experiences Suggest the Existence of Long Tails for Bliss and Suffering, published by algekalipso on the effective altruism forum.
TL;DR
Based on: the characteristic distribution of neural activity, personal accounts of intense pleasure and pain, the way various pain scales have been described by their creators, and the results of a pilot study we conducted which ranks, rates, and compares the hedonic quality of extreme experiences, we suggest that the best way to interpret pleasure and pain scales is by thinking of them as logarithmic compressions of what is truly a long-tail. The most intense pains are orders of magnitude more awful than mild pains (and symmetrically for pleasure).
This should inform the way we prioritize altruistic interventions and…
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Dec 11, 2021
Announcing the EA Virtual Group by SamiM
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This is: Announcing the EA Virtual Group, published by SamiM on the effective altruism forum.
Edit: Sep 30, 2020. We changed our name to EA Anywhere.
1. Background
Hello, I’m Sami and I currently live in Saudi Arabia. I’ve known about EA for about a year or so, but I never had anyone to discuss it with in person. All of my interactions with EA’s have been online.
During the pandemic, I have been lucky to be “adopted” by two EA groups. I joined their online meetings and participated in the book clubs, I finally had someplace where I can engage with EA’s face to face and even make friends with them. I would see familiar faces every week and feel like a part of a community.
Unfortunately, this is coming to an end. Since the restrictions are loosening, local groups will return to hosting in-person meetings and I, along with other…
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Dec 11, 2021
More empirical data on 'value drift' by SamiM
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This is: More empirical data on 'value drift' , published by SamiM on the effective altruism forum.
Edit: Sep 30, 2020. We changed our name to EA Anywhere.
1. Background
Hello, I’m Sami and I currently live in Saudi Arabia. I’ve known about EA for about a year or so, but I never had anyone to discuss it with in person. All of my interactions with EA’s have been online.
During the pandemic, I have been lucky to be “adopted” by two EA groups. I joined their online meetings and participated in the book clubs, I finally had someplace where I can engage with EA’s face to face and even make friends with them. I would see familiar faces every week and feel like a part of a community.
Unfortunately, this is coming to an end. Since the restrictions are loosening, local groups will return to hosting in-person meetings and I, along with…