EA Forum Reader

Investigating the field more deeply this year is going to be one of my hobby projects, but my early impression is that a big part of the claim is that when you do regular project management things wrong, the penalty at least scales. It also looks like the cost of doing the analysis right, such as reference class forecasting, doesn't come remotely close to scaling with the needs of the project.

I'm glad about this, because I was worried at first the whole inquiry might be useless except to people in a position of responsibility. Instead, it looks like there will be a lot of methods that are always a good idea but also scale really well. Bonus!

I can also highly recommend Deep Work by Cal Newport, his main thesis is that 'real' work only happens/productivity is high when you're doing it for a few hours at a time instead of 15min blocks with constant interruptions. Edit: should have read the linked post first haha, so see this as another vote for Cal Newport

This is very cool! Good job!

Some thoughts:

1. It might be worth adding weighting by the number of neurons in sensory-associative structures (or functions of these) as an option, if the data is available.
2. Did you include probabilities of sentience? This would be separate from brain weighting. Charity Entrepreneurship used some numbers, I think mostly borrowed from Luke Muehlhauser at Open Phil, but they aren't already included in their welfare points, so you need to multiply by them yourself. Rethink Priorities has more recent estimates [EA · GW].
3. I think a weighted additive model would be preferable to a weighted product model, mostly just because if we were to combine the harms, we would just add them. A cost-benefit analysis would put prices on CO2e and suffering and add them up, and if we wanted to offset the harms, we would think of them additively. Then,
   1. You could mention the units of food (2000 kcal calories) on the graph.
   2. You could add units to the graph at least for CO2e emissions, since those are pretty interpretable.
   3. You could make up units for suffering (say relative to some reference per day), and include those units, too. Basically, you would be looking at labelling the axis by "CO2e (kg) + weight * suffering", and then just allow weight to go from 0 to infinity (at which point CO2e emissions are ignored). I think this would be more interpretable than the current percentage weights, too.
4. If you're including CO2e emissions, it might be worth adding some plants (and insects?). (People may complain that harms to wild animals aren't included, but to be fair, we would also want to include benefits to wild animals for each product, too, and this would be messy and not super tractable.)
5. You could also consider weighting by critical flicker-fusion frequency to track the subjective experience of time. [EA · GW] Jason Schukraft wrote 3 posts on this topic. Here's the summary [EA · GW], which also links to the other two posts. Consider reaching out to Jason to see if this makes sense.

Also, it might be worth taking a look at this model [EA · GW], too, for more ideas.

That's interesting - I'm surprised by that and wonder if it's due to some differences between systems? In the UK people often begin to think about internships in their first or second years, and ther look for jobs in the 3rd year, so I think there's quite a lot of ability to influence and discuss career plans early on. In the US degrees are longer, but early on people are trying to decide their major which is also a significant career decision. I also think that students have a lot more time and interest in engaging with new things, and they tend to be easier to reach (e.g. because they all come to activity fairs).  How do you find/target these early-career people? And aren't they already normally in employment/set on a career path?

CBGs remains open to non-student groups.

Thank you for the kind words Bella!

No, I think you understood the original post right and my last comment was confusing. When I said "grow" I was imagining "grow in terms of people/impact in the areas we're currently occupying and other adjacent areas that are not listed as "things we're not doing"".

I don't expect us to start doing the things listed in the post in the next 4-10 years (though I might be wrong on some counts). We'll be less likely to do thing if others are doing good work in the area (as with fundraising).

I was about to say the same thing - I skimmed for "eggs" and it took me a bit to figure it out.

There is also a quite active EA Discord server, which serves the function of "endless group discussions" fairly well, so another Slack workspace might have negligible benefits.

Thanks for the reply!

Honestly, I'm confused by the relation to gender. I'm bracketing out genders that are both not-purely-female and not-purely-male because I don't know enough about the patterns of qualifiers there.

• In general, I think anxious qualifying is more common for women. EA isn't known for having very many women, so I'm a bit confused why there's seemingly so much of it in EA.
• (As a side: This reminds me of a topic I didn't bring into the original post: How much is just a selection effect and how much is EA increasing anxious qualifying. Intuitively, I at least think it's not purely a selection effect, but I haven't thought closely about this.)
• Given the above, I would expect that women are also more likely to take the EA culture, and transform it into excessive use of anxious qualifiers, but that's just speculation. Maybe the percentage change of anxious qualifier use is also higher for men, just because their baseline is lower
• I'm not sure how this affects gender diversity in EA as a whole. I can imagine that it might actually be good because underconfident people might be less scared off if the online communication doesn't seem too confident, and they feel like they can safely use their preferred lots-of-anxious-signalling communication strategy.
• That being said, I guess that what would do the above job (at least) equally good is what I call "3" in my reply to Misha [EA(p) · GW(p)]. Or, at least I'm hopeful that there are some other communication strategies that would have that benefit without encouraging anxious signalling.
• edit: I noticed that the last bullet point doesn't make much sense because I claim elsewhere that 3 can encourage 4 because they look so similar, and I stand by that.

Interestingly, maybe not instructively, I was kind of hesitant to bring gender into my original post. Partly for good reasons, but partly also because I worried about backlash or at least that some people would take it less seriously as a result. I honestly don't know if that says much about EA/society, or solely about me. (I felt the need to include "honestly" to make it distinguishable from a random qualifier and mark it as a genuine expression of cluelessness!)

Reply 3/3

"displaying uncertainty or lack of knowledge sometimes helps me be more relaxed"

I think there's a good version of that experience and I think that's what you're referring to, and I agree that's a good use of qualifiers. Just wanted to make a note to potential readers because I think the literal reading of that statement is a bit incomplete. So, this is not really addressed at you :)

I think displaying uncertainty or lack of knowledge always helps to be more relaxed even when it comes from a place of anxious social signalling. (See my first reply for what exactly I mean with that and what I contrast it to) That's why people do it. If you usually anxiously qualify and force yourself not to do it, that feels scary. I still think, practicing not to do it will help with self-confidence, as in taking yourself more seriously, in the long run. (Apart from efficient communication)*

Of course, sometimes you just need to qualify things (in the anxious social signalling sense) to get yourself in the right state of mind (e.g. to feel safe to openly change your mind later, freely speculate, or to say anything at all in the first place), or allowing yourself the habit of anxious social signalling makes things so much more efficient, that you should absolutely go for it and not beat yourself up over it. Actually, an-almost ideal healthy confidence probably also includes some degree of what I call anxious social signalling and it's unrealistic to get rid of all of it.

• I just found one other frame for what I meant with anxious social signalling partly being rewarded in EA. Usually, that kind of signaling means others take you less seriously. I think it's great that that's not so much the case in EA, but I worry that sometimes it may look like people in EA take you more seriously when you do it. Maybe because EA actually endorses what I call 3 in my first reply, but - to say the same thing for the 100th time - I worry that it also encourages anxious social signalling.