I think this is an interesting idea, but currently the EA hotel is struggling to obtain sufficient funding, so I wouldn't so it as beneficial to spring up a second long-term residential program while there's already one very similar such experiment in progress. If anyone would want to be a student in such a school they can already apply to the EA hotel and learn the skills that they need. It's more self-directed than your idea, but I suspect that this is a vital skill for most EA jobs.
That sounds like a much better approach as it requires much less resources to be committed upfront.
Does the~£265 figure take into account rent from those who are paying it?
"In general it’s probably best not to anonymize applications. Field studies generally show no effect on interview selection, and sometimes even show a negative effect (which has also been seen in the lab)" - It seems strange to mention this and then not even address the obvious implication that one might draw from this.
The other point is that these practises are analysed as though they don't have tradeoffs, when there almost always is. I suppose discussing this would make this document even longer than it is, but you have listed these as "recommendations" as opposed to "possible approaches".
I would distinguish between poor journalism and not taking a very EA perspective. We shouldn't conflate the two. It's worth noting that Future Perfect is inspired by EA, rather than an EA publication. I also think it's important for the journalists writing to be able to share their own perspective even if it disagrees with the EA consensus. That said, some articles I've seen have been overly ideological or unnecessarily polarising and that worries me.
How much was the grant and from which organisation?
What has Effective Altruism actually done?
2019-01-14T14:07:50.062Z · score: 22 (12 votes)I have a few other ideas that aren't listed here:
- EA Climate Change Co-ordination - a reasonable number of EAs are interested in climate change, but nothing seems to have happened in this domain partly due to a lack of co-ordination
- EA Leadership program - leadership programs are very popular among students and so this could be a good (if high effort) way of spreading EA ideas
- Regarding career workshops, instead of an organisation trying to run this itself, some group could create a training course for people who want to give career advice
- A group to perform rationality outreach (spreading rationality ideas generally seems good for in EA as the rationality community produces new ideas for EA and also provides a source of potential recruits)
- A project to aggregate ideas on different topics. It could get a bunch of EAs together to brainstorm like this and also allow public submissions. All of the ideas could be written up into a post like this
- Media outreach - most EAs are quite negative on media outreach, but I can see value in writing articles that specifically aim to correct misperceptions about both EA and AI
- A project to produce personal outreach materials. Some groups (like evangelical Christianity) focus heavily on growing through personal outreach. You don't want people to end up being pushy, but this is probably worth investigating more
- Niche outreach was mentioned, but I expect niche outreach to Christians could be especially valuable
- Religious organisations often send people to different cities in order to engage in movement building, this might be something that EA might want to experiment with as well
I think that a lot of the potential value comes from the connections that people make. Although this is probably lessened to an extent by the fact that the hotel is so fully booked up as it makes it harder for someone to just join someone else's project after they've finished theirs.
If You’re Young, Don’t Give To Charity
2018-12-24T11:55:42.798Z · score: 17 (10 votes)It actually doesn't make a difference in terms of expected value
"Where it really used to be the case that nanotechnology was... atomically precise manufacturing was regarded as one of the existential risks. And I think people just converged on thinking that actually that argument was very much overblown." - Why is it considered overblown?
I'm curious why parts of the old website were removed, instead of being left up while the redevelopment occurred.
Enough possibility space still exists that it seems worth at least experimenting to see if a professional organiser could value add, even if it were only by better advertising and promoting the opportunities that already exist. Especially now that CEA is increasing its focus on one-on-one meetups.
"Also many of the things community builders are doing in other places make much less sense in Berkeley" - Could you clarify?
Curious to see that there isn't a dedicated organiser in the Bay Area as that seems to be one of the regions that would be most receptive
Replace "growing" the rationality community with "developing" the rationality community. But that's a good point. It is worthwhile keeping in mind that the two are seperate. I imagine one of the first tasks of such a group would be figuring out what this actually means.
The size of the rationality community hasn't been limited so much by quality concerns, as by lack of effort expended in growth.
I was referring specifically to growing the rationality community as a cause area.
"In terms of web-traffic and general intellectual influence among the intellectual elite, the sequences as well as HPMOR and Scott Alexander's writing have attracted significant attention and readership, and mostly continue doing so" - I was talking more about academia than the blogosphere. Here, only AI safety has had reasonable penetration. EA has had several heavyweights in philosophy, plus FHI for a while and also now GPI.
Rationality as an EA Cause Area
2018-11-13T14:48:25.011Z · score: 5 (19 votes)I think debate has its problems as well - if a small minority of judges hold certain ideological views very strongly, they can ensure that it is very hard to take the opposite stance.
Also arguments are very heavily weighed towards those which can be made quickly. Even worse, arguments that are made more often can be made more quickly as you don't have to step through the details, so there is a bandwagon effect.
I'm a bit sad that the beta doesn't make much use of the new features that LW added, but I suppose we just have to give it time. I'm particularly keen to see what will be done with the sequences feature.
I checked out the Ziferblat in London recently and it was really cool, but it's unfortunately shutting down now due to the price of rent.
Did the group grow at all during this period?
These issues are relevant for any ethical system that assigns non-zero weight to the consequences.
This seems like a huge amount of work for what seems like a somewhat uncertain impact.
EA grants seems like it should be in between in terms of being prescriptive vs. descriptive. If I had to pull a number out of a hat, then perhaps half the grants could be in the areas CEA considers most important and the other half could be more open.
I still have doubts as to whether you should pay in Counterfactual Mugging since I believe that (non-quantum) probability is in the map rather than the territory. I haven't had the opportunity to write up these thoughts yet as my current posts are building up towards it, but I can link you when I do.
I am similarly suspicious. Someone should look into this more.
How anonymous would you want this to be? Like would the mods still know who posted it?
Why do we need our own Leverage Research? What have they achieved?
I suspect that competition isn't especially healthy at the stage where the struggle is just to obtain critical mass. Multiple projects have failed to generate enough momentum to sustain them, if the community divides its attention between multiple such projects, success is less likely.
Three levels of cause prioritisation
2018-05-28T07:26:32.333Z · score: 8 (15 votes)I'd be very curious about what the HR professionals thought about giving feedback.
What's Givewell's CEA?
Meta: It might be good to announce AMA's in advance so that more people know to be online at that time.
Thanks very much!
I'd really appreciate a sentence or two on each of the following questions:
- What is termination shock risk?
- What is the main concern with unilateral deployment?
- What is the worry re: interstate conflict?
"The number of new event attendees, for a given group, who were not familiar with EA beforehand was even more striking. Here none of the largest groups were among the top groups" - too many new group members at once is not good for a group. Have you heard of the Eternal September effect?
My understanding is that EA Australia is hiring, but they don't have anyone yet.
Out of curiosity, how many local groups already have paid organisers and how do you think this compares with an additional employee at a non-local EA org?
One of the biggest challenges is trying to even figure out how likely it is caused by something physical vs. a psychological root cause. It is a very controversial topic, to say the least. I spent about an hour looking into this, but I wasn't really able to get anywhere, at least without any knowledge of the field or where to find reliable information.
You're right. Edited my comment to note that this was actually addressed.
I suspect that this would be a net good. We need to move more people towards cost effectiveness and this involves meetings people where they are. If this succeeded in creating a large group of people who were somewhat closer to the EA perspective, then EA might have a significantly easier time bringing in more members. And I suspect that this might be more than enough to counter-balance any people who change from donating to the most effective globally to the most effective locally.
(EDIT: The commenter below is right that this was addressed and I missed it): You missed one key consideration. It could also redirect money from more efficient overseas charities to less efficient US charities and even if this was a small amount, it may still be net negative if the utility difference was large enough.
"What is the best way to get more people to act upon the principles of effective altruism?" - I'd suggest looking at what the bottleneck is. Are you getting lots of people coming to your meetups and then not coming back or is it mostly just the regular with very few new members? Importantly, if a group has a low retention rate, they probably don't want to scale reach as they'd just burning through people who might have become members if they'd been better placed to capture them. Anyway, from what I've heard mass media outreach doesn't really seem to have been effective for EA groups and that matches what I've seen in Australia too where I haven't heard of a single person who first heard of Effective Altruism through mass media, while in contrast, I've met several who heard of us through more niche channels like podcasts.
Anyway, I'm hugely in favour of EA Sweden exploring politics as it really does seem to be a comparative advantage for the reasons given. EA is much more likely to be able to influence politics in smaller countries where you have more chance of getting a meeting with important people and there are a lot of advantages of exploring working in politics when any fallout might be contained.
Even if we had funds, the problem of who to fund is a hard one and perhaps it would be better spent simply hiring more staff for EA orgs? The best way to know that you can trust someone is to know them personally, but distributing funds in that manner creates concerns about favouritism, ect.
Sadly, EA negatively selects against do-ers, because do-ers need opportunities to make a direct difference. There are plenty of opportunities to do things within meta-EA, but people need to buy into EA before they want to work on meta-EA, so we need some more immediate volunteering opportunities to bridge the gap. I do like the Self-Care, Direct Impact, Career Capital and Personal Fit breakdown, although I'd probably split motivation off into a seperate category, as some volunteering opportunities can motivate you more to give to charity or to work to make a difference in the world.
Anyone want to volunteer to list the most promising one's for those of us who don't want to read the whole list?
I'd also add: Get a group of people together. Easiest way is to create a Facebook Group and promote it. Getting a new cause into EA is a huge amount of work and so you don't want to try to do it single handed.
I also feel that EA hub is outdated. Firstly, I'm not a fan of the green design - I suspect that a more modern design would add credibility to the whole enterprise. Secondly, the interface isn't particularly well designed. I think it might be better if there was just one point for the people in each city and clicking there showed you all the names. Lastly, it seems like it would be nice if you could get notifications when a new person is found near you and if people to opt-in to receive messages from other EAs. If done well, we might make it significantly easier for new EA groups to get off the ground.
I also think that the difficulty in finding actions to take is very concerning. EA needs more do-ers than thinkers, but right now, we have a negative selection against do-ers because there are plenty of interesting ideas to think about, but much less clear actions to take.
Viewing Effective Altruism as a System
2017-12-28T10:09:43.004Z · score: 21 (21 votes)Would love to see LW2.0 become the new code base, but it still undergoing rapid changes at the moment and isn't completely stable.
Thanks for writing up this post! I'd also like to encourage you to write up some tips for managing EA accounts yourself when you get the time.
"Let's adjust that figure for the suffering rape causes even when non-fatal and say that 100 rapes are as bad as 1 death." - that seems like an unrealistically low figure given that rape can lead to trauma that takes years to get over or derail someone's life.