Thanks for writing this. I think that it would be good if there was at least some EA investment in climate change so a) we gain a better understanding of the issue b) we are in a better position to shift resources this direction if we receive evidence that it is likely to be worse than we expect c) we gain the opportunity to spread EA ideas into the climate change movement
I'm not proposing a huge amount of investment, but I'd love to see at least some.
I agree with the commentators that it is worthwhile keeping in mind that some of the political pressure may in fact be correct, but I also feel that this post is valuable because it helps highlight the kinds of pressures that we are subject to.
I think, for good or bad, EA is much more vulnerable to pressure from the left-wing because the institutions we interface with and the locations where most EAs are based lean that way.
To what extent do you think people are born that way and to what extent do you think they become it? If they are more born that way, how do we get such people involved? And if they become it, how do we make that happen?
Most important unfulfilled role in the EA ecosystem?
2019-04-05T11:37:00.294Z · score: 14 (4 votes)I think this is an excellent idea and that someone should pursue this. I'm sure plenty of people have considered paying someone else to manage the negotiation for them before, but the risk is always that the fees don't outweigh the increase in wage you would have gotten negotiating by yourself. Here, since the money is going to charity, this risk is much less of a concern because at least it is doing something and the world has improved even if you don't earn a single extra dollar.
I'm actually donating to the Patreon, but here are the arguments against that are most persuasive to me:
One argument I've heard raised is that the EA hotel is a rather expensive way of testing the idea of supporting EAs with low-cost living. Perhaps it would have been better to have started with a smaller scale experiment such as a group house and perhaps funding the EA hotel is too costly a way of learning about the potential of such projects.
Another is that the EA hotel should be more selective about who it admits, unlike its current very minimally low bar in order to achieve sufficient expected return. Some people may believe that the current approach is unlikely to be cost effective and that the hotel as it is currently structured is therefore testing the wrong thing. In this case, spending a few hundred thousand pounds on informational value could be seen as waste. Worse, we can imagine that after such a failure, funders would be extremely reluctant to fund a similar project that was more selective. In this case, the thing that we'd want to test might never actually be tested.
A third option is that people might not want to donate because they don't believe that other people will donate. Let's suppose that you believe the hotel needs to run for at least another year before it could build up the kind of track record for it to be sustainable and you have the option to donate one month's worth of funding. It seems that donating one month's worth of operating expenses might allow the hotel to do one month's worth of good regardless of whether it later collapses or not, so perhaps this is irrelevant.
However, there may be two ways in which you may be trying to leverage your donation to have more than just direct impact. Firstly, if the hotel survives to the point where it builds up a track record to justify for others to fund it, counterfactual value is generated to the extent that the hotel is better than the other opportunities available to those funders. And by allowing this opportunity to exist, you would get to claim part of this value. Secondly, we can imagine extreme success scenarios where the hotel turned out to be so successful that the EA community decided to copy the concept around the world. Again, you could claim partial responsibility for this.
But, the key point is that if you think other funders won't be forthcoming, you'll miss out on these highly leverage scenarios. And if these are the reasons you'd want to fund the hotel, you might decide it's best to fund something else instead.
A List of Things For People To Do
2019-03-08T11:34:43.164Z · score: 41 (28 votes)This is an interesting idea, but I'm skeptical as I think it underestimates the difficulties in co-ordination. Givewell has had difficulty with volunteers due to unreliability. Another datapoint is the shift in .IMPACT (now Rethink Charity) from relying on volunteers to relying on paid staff. Volunteer hierarchical organisations will be hit by these issues doubly hard as they are relying on volunteers for both management and object level work. I would love to be proven wrong though.
I'm not saying everyone should go into this, just that a portion should
Impact investing to encourage companies to do more on AI Safety is a particularly fascinating idea. I'm curious how much your influence depends on the number of shares. Obviously if you own 20% of a company you're likely to be heard, but is there much difference between owning 1 share vs. 100?
I would suggest that the presence of such a high amount of talent means that projects like the EA hotel are more vital since this increases the amount of talent that can be deployed.
Yeah, InIn was the main attempt at this. Gleb was able to get a large number of articles published in news sources, but at the cost of quality. And some people felt that this would make people perceive rationality negatively, as well as drawing in people from the wrong demographic. I think he was improving over time, but perhaps too slowly?
PS. Have you seen this? https://www.clearerthinking.org
I would be surprised to see much activity on a comment on a three month old thread. If you want to pursue this, I'd suggest writing a new post. Good luck, I'd love to see someone pursuing this project!
What was the issue with the anti-debate?
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: 29 (14 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: 17 (24 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.