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Yea, I agree with your analyses in the article, though I'd be interested in understanding the relative effects
Some of these DCP cost-effectiveness estimates are terribly low: few dollars per QALY, compared to GiveWell's evaluation of their top charities (on the order of $100/QALY).
Even more surprisingly, looking into DCP3, the top 4 interventions had negative cost-effectiveness values.
This seems to me to be mostly because these cost-effectiveness analyses are from a decision-maker standpoint. Say, a hospital that can choose between different medications (e.g. for malaria, $4/DALY) or a governmental policy that can reduce overall health costs (e.g. reducing salt intake, reduction of $1.4k per DALY).



Also
Sure, I'd be happy to submit some ideas for your proverb contest! Here are ten proverbs that might help convince the world of the wisdom of giving directly:
- "Give a man a fish, and you feed him for a day. Give him money, and you empower him for a lifetime."
- "Teaching a man to fish is only effective if he can afford the fishing rod."
- "A dollar given directly can do more than a dollar given with strings attached."
- "Money in hand is better than promises in the future."
- "A person in need knows their own situation better than anyone else."
- "Trust in the wisdom of those in need to decide how best to use the resources given to them."
- "Giving directly allows individuals to take ownership of their own solutions."
- "Empowering individuals with resources and agency fosters long-term independence and sustainability."
- "Providing cash transfers can break the cycle of poverty by allowing individuals to invest in their future."
- "Giving directly is not just about charity, it's about justice and dignity for all."
ChatGPT:
- "Give a person a hammer, and they can build a house. Give them money, and they can build a home."
- "Giving cash is like giving a seed to a farmer, it allows them to plant and grow their own future."
- "Teaching a man to fish is important, but giving him the resources to buy a fishing net and boat is just as crucial."
- "Cash is not dependency, it is empowerment. It allows people to make their own choices and shape their own future."
- "Giving cash is not a handout, it's a hand up. It provides the resources needed for people to lift themselves out of poverty."
- "Empower people with cash, and they will teach others how to fish."
- "Cash is like fuel for the engine of economic growth. It allows people to invest in themselves and their communities."
- "Giving cash is not a one-time fix, it's a sustainable solution to poverty."
- "Cash is not just a means to an end, it's an investment in human potential."
- "When you give cash, you give people the freedom to determine their own path and create their own success."
Deepmind seems to have ~400 patents (link), while OpenAI doesn't seem to file patents. This is a recent Forbes article on OpenAI being potentially open to a lawsuit from google regarding the use of transformers (link).
A really brief and naive search for patent litigations for terms like "neural networks" or "machine learning" here didn't find any substantial increasing trend, but I don't understand this database at all..
Really important and exciting! Good luck!
Looking a bit at your website, and the description here, it isn't clear to me how core is the focus on insect welfare compared to other considerations. Do you have a strong position on the matter? E.g. do you oppose or support insect farming?
(I guess this could also be a strategic choice to collaborate with the existing ecosystem)
Looking briefly at their rating methodology guide, I am cautiously impressed with their approach to impact evaluation, considering that they try to perform shallow evaluations at a large scale, at least within-cause. Specifically, it seems to me that they understand the limitations of their models well.
That said, between-cause comparison doesn't exist, the quality of evidence isn't taken into account as far as I can tell, and there probably are some other issues.
I'll try and take a closer look 🕵️♂️
As a side-note, I was really impressed to see now their donation guide have this article on effective giving by Dr. Lucious Caviola and Dr. Joshua Greene, which hits all the usual EA points very well. The article itself is the second link on "Giving 101". (It seems to have been written a couple of months ago)
Sounds fun! I think we can set up a few teams in Israel, and run such an event in parallel, if that makes sense.
An automated database of philanthropic grants in the US: https://www.grantmakers.io
Just out of curiosity, and maybe it'd help readers with answers, could you share why you are interested in this question?
Plotting the estimates, we get:

This looks logarithmic. Plotting the probability over Log(Year - 2022) does look linear (although clearly it is't, as it is bounded to [0,1], so a better fit would probably be something "arctan"y):

Also, it makes sense to me that uncertainty over "time until E" would behave more like a log-normal distribution (when the probability is fixed). That is, I'd expect that a forecaster's estimate for years-until-AGI in particular probability p would itself be a lognormal distribution over the years (as I imagine the forecaster would be equally likely to be wrong by twice as many years or half as many years).
This justifies taking the geometric mean over the years (as it corresponds to an average over the log of the years), but not when looking at the probabilities.
Fitting the curve with a linear function (excluding the N/As), we get

For , we'd get
For , we'd get
For , we'd get
Or, for a probability , we'd get the year .
For , we'd get
For , we'd get
For , we'd get
Overall, I got rather similar numbers 😊
What do you think of ACE's recent recommendations?
It brings to mind birds colliding with windows (wiki). It's estimated that more than 100 million birds die each year from colliding into a window in the US alone and there are some legislative work to address it (say, by "painting" them with patterns visible in the UV spectrum).
It might be cost-effective to promote such legislation. I haven't looked into the details at all, except for the wiki page.
(also the inner-doc links inside footnote 46 point to the doc)
Mind expending on this?
Thanks for the write up :) Quick question, when would the charities prefer getting money through you rather than directly?
Thank you! 💖
Tables:

Moderator comments behave weirdly in dark mode
I love this! These kinds of maps give so much clarity, and I find this one particularly well designed. Makes me want many more of these for other causes!
Should we encourage or discourage people from adding their projects here?
How about changing this into some sort of a "Change My View" system, or commit to some reward? Not sure why someone would want to put in time to prove you wrong, or to vote correspondingly, in order to ban you.
Also, you might very well be wrong in some important way, but still add a meaningful and novel viewpoint to an important problem.
A lot of your comments have been very well received and possibly have meaningfully contributed to doing more good, but I see that you haven't made any posts. Maybe you should try more of a "long-form" writing first? Possibly, send it to some people for review first, and edit accordingly, and then publish it. It's really hard to do justice to any topic, and the four arguments you allude to involve deep questions that have been on the minds of many people.
"Good Mood Institute"
(And generally, you or anyone else should feel free to report comments from moderators if you find them damaging the forum's discussion. It may well happen, and it's important to get that kind of feedback)
Thanks, you may be right.
To be clear, I found these generated examples clearly false and misleading but still something that I can understand people who feel like this, so I found it a bit funny and uncanny, while I totally agree with JoyOptimizer's concern.
has two cats, presumably trained to attack his enemies.

They are only trained to be maximally adorable and cuddle my enemies to a fluffy friendship!
Yea, I think you are correct and it should be 90,000
Beautiful
I know of ~3 people who've applied or are applying, and expect there to be more I don't know of :)
I don't think I've heard of them, but they seem to do really exciting work! I'm more enthusiastic about the direct health benefits they could offer, rather than the potential flowthrough effects of preventing x-risks, unless they have specially designed programs for major pandemics.
I like that their main solution is "disease agnostic" (in their principles for the ethical deployment of AI), and that they work in building tools for (their medical) researchers rather than just automating everything. Looking at their work it does look like there's a lot of low-hanging fruits to be plucked.
Hey George!
Curious if you have any updates to share about this project :)
Edited to include the text. Did only a little bit of formatting, and added the appendix as is, so it's not perfect. Let me know if you have any issues, requests, or what not :)
Hey! This looks like a really interesting space and I wish you all the best with your endeavor!
I'm not sure how this fits in with the forum though. Are you interested in ideas that can maximize impact or financial return? (Both are fine! Just that the latter has less relevance here)
Maybe you could start an "EA Forum" team? I bet they'd approve that, but I know nothing :)
Thanks for writing this! The section on "stop rewarding modesty" was especially interesting and will stick with me
Agree! Hauke, let me know if you'd want me to do that on your behalf (say, using admin permissions to edit that previous post to add the doc content) if it'll help :)
For readers, here are links to The Malala Fund and the Global Health and Development Fund (part of EA Funds).
The consideration of whether to help people in poverty without solving the problem of poverty itself is a good one! In a slightly different formulation, it had been addressed in this amazing work - Growth and the case against randomista development.
However, the question of how exactly we can alleviate poverty is still very tough. For example, GiveWell's analysis of educational programs in developing countries concludes that there's very limited evidence on the impact of education on improved future earnings, and their cost-effectiveness model suggests that they are about (0.5x-3x) as cost-effective as direct cash transfers. This contrasts with the large potential effects of direct health interventions, like deworming, which could be much higher (but there's still a lot of uncertainty and debate).
Having worked with Yonatan on various community-building efforts, and discussing many technical and nontechnical projects with him, I'm very optimistic about the value he can give if he has the resources and freedom to do so. Happy to serve as a reference.
Main impressions:
- He is very aligned and happy to sacrifice his time, money, and credit to do more good.
- Very helpful to EA community members and organizations, and makes sure to be very pleasant and accessible.
- Thinks clearer than most about ways of doing good, and acts based on the resulting logical conclusions, even if controversial.
- Evidently, very open, honest, and direct.
- Great quick-and-dirty approach to starting new projects.
- Very independent, and knows how to solicit design requirements and quick feedback.
- He may not be the most ridiculous EA in Israel, but he is close 🐱🚀⛸🥽
- To work with him effectively long-term, one should have very open communication and give him the freedom to pursue the goals and directions he believes in.
(Yonatan, I'm curious as to whether/how much you agree with these 😊)
Thanks!💕
This is amazing! I never knew how much I want to know about changes in people's attitudes over time 😊
Some questions that interest me here, changes in time of the following [written with haste]
- moral attitudes (utilitarianism vs deontology, welfare vs preferential, human vs animal, maximizing vs satisficing, ...)
- Particular moral values like nationalism, globalism, pacifism, consumerism, pursuit of happiness, importance of freedom, justice, equality, ...
- Trust in institutions (government, academia, types of media, large tech companies, other countries [China, Russia])
- attitude about the future (extinction? AI? pandemics? war? settling other star systems? utopia? digital life?)
- attitude toward philanthropy, EA, other social movements, particular and nonparticular billionaires
🤣
Thanks, yea. I guess I'm asking if there are other people or functionalities of EV outside of EV Ops or the constituent orgs, and outside the board.
Does EV have any current employees outside of EV Ops?
Love her work, looking forward to the interview! 😊