Welcome to the fourth open thread on the Effective Altruism Forum. This is our place to discuss relevant topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
Welcome to the fourth open thread on the Effective Altruism Forum. This is our place to discuss relevant topics that have not appeared in recent posts.
I'm interested in if anyone has any data or experience attempting to introduce people to EA through conventional charitable activities like blood drives, volunteering at a food bank, etc. The idea I've been kicking around is basically start or co-opt a blood drive or whatever event.
While people are engaged in the activity, or before or after, you introduce them to the idea of EA. Possibly even using this conventional charitable event as the prelude to a giving game. On the plus side the people you are speaking with are self-selected for doing charitable a... (read more)
There is a lot of discussion about what to DO in the context of EA. But for everything I do, there is something else that I don't.
What have you decided NOT to do, because it has a (somewhat) lower priority than other things?
Things that I downprioritized:
some recreational activities: playing the guitar, cooking, baking cakes, reading novels.
I quit volunteering in an online education project. It was low time cost anyway.
meditating (would that increase productivity more than the time spent on it? I don't really care about the other benefits.)
keep an
In a couple of weeks, I'm going to give a 10-minute talk (with slides) on effective altruism at the software company I work for (Scribd.com). The audience will be ~40 people, many of whom I am friends with & many of whom are well-compensated and intelligent software engineers/designers/etc. (This is part of a thing Scribd does where employees periodically give talks on random topics that interest them.)
I'd love to hear any suggestions for the content of my talk. I'm curious what evidence we have about the most effective ways to convince people of ef... (read more)
[AMF and its RFMF]
I'm curious as to whether people are giving to AMF, and if so what they think of its room for more funding. I used to favour it but haven't done so since GiveWell stopped recommending it due to room for more funding concerns. Their financial information suggests that they still have a large cash reserve, but I'd be interested to hear from anyone who's looked into this.
Is there any interest in an EA blogging carnival?
How it works is that each month, a different blogger "hosts" the carnival by selecting a topic. Everyone interested in participating for that month then writes a blog post about that topic. The host then writes up a post linking to all the submissions.
We are planning to do a survey of a representative selection of students at NTNU, our university in Trondheim, Norway. There are about 23 000 students across a few campuses. We want to measure the students':
... basic knowledge of global development, aid and health (like Hans Rosling's usual questions)
... current willingness and habits of giving (How much? To what? Why?)
... estimates of what they will give in the future, that is after graduating
And of course background information.
We think we may use this survey for multiple ends. Our initial motiv... (read more)
[Your recent EA activities]
Tell us about these, as in Kaj's thread last month. I would love to hear about them - I find it very inspirational to hear what people are doing to make the world a better place!
Can anyone recommend to me some work on existential threats as a whole? I don't just mean AI or technology related threats but nuclear war, climate change, etc.
Btw Nick Bostrom's Superintelligence is already at the top of my reading list, and I know Less Wrong is currently engaged in a reading group on that book.
GiveWell have released a summary of the status of their assessments of risks through the Open Philanthropy Project so far. The top contenders are biosecurity and geoengineering, followed by AI, geomagnetic storms, nuclear and food security, although these assessments are at various stages of completion.
We sometimes discuss why EA wasn't invented before. Here's an example of GWWC being re-invented
Is voting valuable?
There are four costs associated with voting:
1) The time you spend deciding on whom to vote.
2) The risk you incur in going to the place where you vote (a non-trivial likelihood of dying due to unusual traffic that day).
3) The attention you pay to politics and associated decision cost.
4) The sensation you made a difference (this cost is conditional on voting not making a difference).
What are the benefits associated with voting:
1) If an election is decided based on one vote, and you voted on one of the winning contestants, your vote decides... (read more)
Recently on the site there have been a number of cross-posts from other websites. I recognise that is great and can bring a lot of value. But I subscribe to the site in an RSS reader and have a very good group of feeds already, including all of the sites content has been cross posted from so far - so the effect for me is to create double posts. My RSS reader has a feature to filter tags or parts of the titles of posts. Would it be possible to tag or add a reddit style brackets tag to cross posts so I can filter them?
Is voting valuable?
There are four costs associated with voting:
1) The time you spend deciding on whom to vote.
2) The risk you incur in going to the place where you vote (a non-trivial likelihood of dying due to unusual traffic that day).
3) The attention you pay to politics and associated decision cost.
4) The sensation you made a difference (this cost is conditional on voting not making a difference).
What are the benefits associated with voting:
1) If an election is decided based on one vote, and you voted on one of the winning contestants, your vote decides who is elected, and is causally responsible for the counterfactual difference between candidates.
2) Depending on your inclinations about how decision theory and anomalous causality actually work in humans, you may think your vote is numerically more valuable because it changes/indicates/represents/maps what your reference class will vote. As if you were automatically famous and influential.
Now I ask you to consider whether benefit (1) would in fact be the case for important elections (elections say where the elected will govern over 10 000 000 people). If 100 Worlds had an election decided based on one vote, which percentage of those would be surreptitiously biased by someone who could tamper with the voting? How many would request a recount? How many would ask it's citizens to vote again? Would deem the election illegitimate? Etc... Maybe some of these worlds would indeed accept the original counting, or do a fair recounting that would reach the exact same number, I find it unlikely this would be more than 80 of these 100 worlds, and would not be surprised if it was 30 or less.
We don't know how likely it is that this will happen, in more than 16000 elections in the US only one was decided by one vote, and it was not an executive function in a highly populated area.
This has been somewhat discussed in the rationalist community before, with different people reaching different conclusions.
Here are some suggestions for EA's that are consistent with the point of view that voting is, ceteris paribus, not valuable:
EA's who are not famous and influential should consider never making political choices.
EA's who are uncertain or live in countries where suffrage is compulsory may want to consider saving time by copying the voting decisions of someone who they trust, to avoid time and attention loss.
Suggestions for those who think voting is valuable:
EAs should consider the marginal cost of copying the voting policy of a non-EA friend/influence they trust highly, and weight it against the time, attention and decision cost of deciding themselves.
EAs should consider using safe vehicles (all the time and) during elections.
EAs who think voting is valuable because it represents what all agents in their reference class would do in that situation should consider other situations in which to apply such decision procedure. There may be a lot at stake in many decisions where using indication and anomalous causation applies - even in domains where this is not the sole ground of justification.