Open Thread #40

The EA Forum Needs More Sub-Forums

EDIT: please go to the recent announcement post on the new EA Forum to comment

The traditional discussion forum has sub-forums and sub-sub-forums where people in communities can discuss areas that they’re particularly interested in. The EA Forum doesn’t have these and this make it hard to filter for what you’re looking for.

On Facebook on the other hand, there are hundreds of groups based around different cause areas, local groups and organisations, and subpopulations. Here it’s also hard to start rigorous discussions around certain topics because many groups are inactive and moderated poorly.

Then there are lots of other small communication platforms launched by organisations that range in their accessibility, quality standards, and moderation. It all kind of works but it’s messy and hard to sort through.

It’s hard to start productive conversations on specialised niche topics with international people because

• 1) Relevant people won’t find you easily within the mass of posts

• 2) You’ll contribute to that mass and thus distract everyone else.

Perhaps this a reason why some posts on specific topics only get a few comments even though the quality of the insights and writing seems high.

Examples of posts that we’re missing out on now:

• Local group organiser Kate tried X career workshop format X times and found that it underperformed other formats

• Private donor Bob dug into the documents of start-up vaccination charity X and wants to share preliminary findings with other donors in the global poverty space

• Machine learning student Jenna would like to ask some specific questions on how the deep reinforcement learning algorithm of AlphaGo functions

• The leader of animal welfare advocacy org X would like to share some local engagement statistics on vegan flyering, 3D headset demos, before sending them off in a more polished form to ACE.

Interested in any other examples you have. :-)

What to do about it?

I don’t have any clear solutions in mind for this (perhaps this could be made a key focus in the transition to using the forum architecture of LessWrong 2.0). Just want to plant a flag here that given how much the community has grown vs. 3 years ago, people should start specialising more in the work they do, and that our current platforms are woefully behind for facilitating discussions around that.

It would be impossible for one forum to handle all this adequately and it seems useful for people to experiment with different interfaces, communication processes and guidelines. Nevertheless, our current state seems far from optimal. I think some people should consider tracking down and paying for additional thoughtful, capable web developers to adjust the forum to our changing needs.

UPDATE: After reading @John Maxwell IV's comments below, I've changed my mind from a naive 'we should overhaul the entire system' view to 'we should tinker with it in ways we expect would facilitate better interactions, and then see if they actually do' view.

Vox is looking for EA journalists. This is an opportunity to publicize EA and help shape its public perception. Their ad hints that they want people who are already in the movement, so take a look if you have any writing or journalism related skills.

Forum searching tip

Searching the forum by typing "site:effective-altruism.com [your search query]" into the URL bar gives you more results - including some very relevant ones - than using the built-in search bar on the top-right of the forum itself (at least for me).

Why I'm skeptical of cost-effectiveness analysis

Reposting as comment because mods told me this wasn't thorough enough to be a post.

Briefly:

• The entire course of the future matters (more)
• Present-day interventions will bear on the entire course of the future, out to the far future
• The effects of present-day interventions on far-future outcomes are very hard to predict
• Any model of an intervention's effectiveness that doesn't include far-future effects isn't taking into account the bulk of the effects of the intervention
• Any model that includes far-future effects isn't believable because these effects are very difficult to predict accurately

Just a newbie exploring the forum!

Hi, I'm new here!

By the looks of it, there is SO much to learn about effective altruism and I absolutely love that. I've really come to accept learning as a never ending process and it's liberating to look at learning that way.

I'm hoping to earn some Karma points so I can make my own posts here and interact with members of this lovely forum, to continuously learn and maybe contribute sometimes along the way.

I've totally bought into the concepts of effective altruism, with the ideals of working as a community to edge closer to a better society resonating with me. I'm so excited about EA that I've decided that I want to help host an Effective Altruism Global X in my home country, Bangladesh.

I know for a fact that not many people know about effective altruism in Bangladesh. I've seen there is a listed group from Bangladesh in Effective Altruism Hub and I've mailed them to get in touch, but I have not detected much activity from them prior to sending them an email.

I just feel that concepts such as "Earning To Give" and "Cause Neutrality" are ideas that more people should know about. So many people do not fully understand the potential for impact each individual holds, they underestimate their potential to do good and do not invest their time in finding out what they can do with their career to have more impact. So many incredibly intelligent people, due to lack of information that could have been easily available, prematurely decide that earning money is the best they can do with their lives.

I absolutely believe that coming across 80,000 Hours was one of the luckiest moments in my life. The way they use scientific evidence to make a person understand the sheer capacity in one's hands, whether through donating effectively, advocacy, or direct work as explained in parts 2 and 3 of the career guide, inspires people to go out there and dedicate their lives to learning and doing good better.

Bangladesh, a lower-middle income country, is an area that desperately needs more effective altruists. Also derived from the career guide, in identifying proper problem areas, they should be large enough in scale, neglected, and solvable. Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, is the most overcrowded city in the world according to a 2017 post by the Telegraph, and 5th in the world in population density according to Wikipedia. Dhaka is a regular in the Economist Intelligence Unit's annual rankings of the "Least Liveable Cities" in the world. Dhaka came 2nd in 2014. Whether the misfortune of the people of Bangladesh is due to a weak government, swayed by corruption, or a lack of unity by the people, one thing is clear, that spreading the ideals of effective altruism has potential for massive impact in Bangladesh. The facts are that even if an effective altruist group exists in Dhaka, they have not been active and there is a huge opportunity to turn some heads and galvanize the doers of the society with the effective altruism movement, so that we can stride towards the development of our society that has been overdue now.

I'm very excited to meet more wonderful people, and learn many new things. It keeps me awake at night to think of what a success an effective altruist community fostered in Bangladesh could prove to be. I have not yet applied to be an organizer, because I thought I should maybe get at least a little bit involved with the community.

Lots of things to look forward to, and that is always how life should be.

Love,

Farhan

I was terrified of pursuing an EA career

For 3 years after joining EA I was still set on going to medical school. I knew I could do more but I was just terrified of switching. Even when I got an opportunity presented to me I was very torn between pursuing it or staying in my comfort zone. Now I'm having the best summer of my life in a biosecurity internship. I'm more motivated, I'm more productive, I'm going on more adventures, and I have a lot more and better connections than before.

EA was amazing in that having this network made it easier to go into an effective field than any other option I have, and for the first time in my life I'm doing something I'm passionate about.

So if any of you reading this and you're on the fence about a big career change, just know that it might be harder than your current plan, but it might also be easier!

Requesting Help for a Compilation of Top EA Facebook Posts

In December 2015, Claire Zabel posted links to all posts in the EA Facebook group with 50 or more likes or comments. I think it's time for a similar post. From what I understand, the most liked and most commented on posts can be found using the "My groups dashboard" feature on Facebook. Unfortunately, I do not have a Facebook account. I am posting in this thread to request that someone with a Facebook account post the most liked and most commented on posts as a reply to this comment. I can then go through each of them and extract the key information about each (see below) so people can see if there are any they want to read without clicking every single one. I would then post this information as its own forum post. Alternatively, you can do the extracting yourself and post it as a forum post yourself.

Format

• Author: Initials are used to prevent future employers from easily associating the post with the author (unless the person is a prominent EA who is likely to remain in EA, in which case the full name is used).
• Year: This can give people context as various ideas have become more or less accepted over time.
• Text: If the full text is too long, an excerpt is chosen that encapsulates the post.
• URL: This allows people to read the post for themselves.
• Link Title: This helps people decide whether to click on the link.
• Link Author: This is included when the identity of the author is relevant (generally only when the author is an EA).
• Link URL: This allows people to go directly to the link without having to go to the post first.

You can see examples of this formatting below.

Posts with the Most Likes as of December 2015 (based on Claire Zabel's comment)

1)

• Author: Peter Hurford
• Year: 2014
• Text: "EA Onion Article Headlines"
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/722086321181061

2)

• Author: Robert Wiblin
• Year: 2015
• Text: "William takes 5 criticisms of Zuckerberg to pieces. The nonsense thrown at him has appalled me:"
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/971385786251112
• Link Title: 5 criticisms of billionaire mega-philanthropy, debunked
• Link Author: William MacAskill
• Link URL: https://qz.com/564805/5-criticisms-of-billionaire-mega-philanthropy-debunked/

3)

• Author: Robert Wiblin
• Year: 2015
• Text: "We are really excited to announce that 80,000 Hours got into the world's leading startup incubator Y Combinator which helped build AirBnB, Dropbox and Reddit, among many others. As a result we are temporarily living in Mountain View!"
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/911770118879346
• Link Title: Want To Make An Impact With Your Work? Try Some Advice From 80,000 Hours
• Link URL: https://techcrunch.com/2015/08/04/80000-hours/

4)

• Author: William MacAskill
• Year: 2015
• Text: "Peter Singer is running a MOOC on Effective Altruism. Cool, eh? Sign up if you want to learn more:"
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/850791891643836
• Link URL: https://www.coursera.org/learn/altruism

5)

• Author: William MacAskill
• Year: 2015
• Text: "Today is the launch day for Doing Good Better!"
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/908514712538220
• Link URL: https://www.amazon.com/Doing-Good-Better-Effective-Difference/dp/1592409105/

Posts with the Most Comments as of December 2015 (based on Claire Zabel's comment)

1) Unable to access

2)

• Author: Jacy Reese
• Year: 2015
• Text: "Kelsey Piper, from Stanford Effective Altruists, wrote this thoughtful post explaining how she feels about the issue [of whether meat is served in EA spaces], which summarizes many of our views (although, of course, we don't all agree in the details), and I'd encourage everyone to read it to better understand the issue."
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/914246908631667
• Link Title: preference accommodation problems
• Link Author: Kelsey Piper
• Link URL: https://theunitofcaring.tumblr.com/post/126310876481/preference-accommodation-problems

3)

• Author: C. H.
• Year: 2013
• Text: "To those who agree with Alexander Kruel: Does CFAR have the same problems as MIRI and LessWrong? I've read good things about CFAR elsewhere in this group, but there was a time when I was reading so many good things about MIRI and LessWrong that I consider myself lucky to have dodged the Basilisk."
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/570478889675139
• Link Title: AI Risk Critiques: Index
• Link Author: Alexander Kruel
• Link URL: http://kruel.co/2012/07/17/ai-risk-critiques-index/

4)

• Author: Robert Wiblin
• Year: 2015
• Text: "What academic disciplines do you think we here are undervaluing relative to their usefulness, and should be making an active effort to learn from? My top guess at the moment is history."
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/856678024388556

5)

• Author: T. B.
• Year: 2014
• Text: "In Robert Wiblin's summit talk, he estimated that about 80-90% of EAs are concerned about animal suffering[.] [Is this correct?]"
• URL: https://www.facebook.com/437177563005273/posts/725327480856945

Should EAs work on reducing food waste?

According to USDA statistics, a significant percent of food purchased by consumers goes uneaten (15% of chicken, 35% of turkey, 20% of beef, 29% of pork, and 23% of the edible portion of eggs). If consumers wasted less food, they would purchase less meat/eggs/dairy, which would lead to fewer animals suffering on factory farms.

One factor that could be driving food waste is confusing date labeling. For example, an egg container may have a 'Sell By' date meant to help retailers manage their inventory, but a consumer who sees the label and date some time after purchasing might throw the eggs away thinking they are no longer safe to eat. One possible solution is a federal labeling law that limits producers to listing the freshness date and the expiration date (and requires them to use specific easy to understand phrases when listing either). However, there are several reasons that working towards such a law may be a bad use of resources. First, legal change may be unnecessary as it appears the food industry may voluntarily adopt such a system. Second, it's unclear how much labeling reform reduces food waste (I was unable to find any studies in my brief search). Third, it may be that the primary benefits of reducing animal product consumption are the long term effects, in which case reductions in consumption driven by factors other than concern for animals may be much less impactful. Of course, there may also be other ways to reduce food waste (to which the first two concerns would not apply).

Seeking 5 karma so I can post about the recent WASR grant competition! :)

New here. Hoping to get some karma points so that I can ask specific questions for the local community development project I have planned.

I just finished reading "The Nobel Laureates' Guide To The Smartest Targets For The World" and can not find the specific methods that can be employed to achieve the proposed targets. For example: with regard to coral reef loss, if the research is accurate and there is a 24$ economic return for every 1$ spent, through what organizations or processes can this be achieved? The specific dollar figure must imply that the process is known. Is there a separate resource of footnotes that describe how to achieve those returns? The short book was very interesting as a navigation tool towards the initiatives that may have the greatest economic return and resultant prosperity for humankind.

Thanks for any insights if you get the chance. -Tom

Seeking 5 upvotes in order to make a post.

Looking for Karma points.

Hi all, I would like to post a critical perspective on maximizing happiness. It includes an alternative approach, mental health issues and burnout. I would love to see a discussion about it, but not only on FB :) Anyone interested and willing to give me some karma to enable my post?

Cheers :)

Frequency of Open Threads

What do people think would be the optimal frequency for open threads? Monthly? Quarterly? Semi-annually?

Impact Investing from an EA Perspective

This is just a teaser, since I don't have enough karma for a full post yet!

Picture a scale that has charity one one side (good social utility, -100% financial return) and Investing on the other (zero social utility, 7% financial return). Impact investing is a space that can give similar risk-adjusted market returns as traditional investments, but also provides social utility.

In my research, I've found several factors that make me excited about this area:

• Impact investing is about 5% the size of charitable donations (22B vs 410B in 2016), and is growing much faster (17% vs 4% annually)

• Impact investing makes up only 0.16% of the total capital markets - huge room for growth

• Philanthropic enterprises with sustainable business models can use existing capital markets to get funded on a large scale

• Due to the market's current inability to accurately value the 'social utility' provided, there are many greatly under-valued investment opportunities, providing similar social utility as comparable charities

I've got more detail, logic and sources in the full post, but in the mean time, I'll tell you about one example opportunity that I've zoomed-in on.

WorldTree is a company that lets you buy an acre of fast-growing Empress Splendor trees. It's goal is to generate income from the harvest of the trees, and offset the carbon footprint of investors:

• $2500 CAD minimum investment, enough to plant 1 acre of trees
• One acre is enough to offset your lifetime carbon footprint
• The timber is sold after 10 years, conservative return to the investor is $20k

From an EA perspective, I compared the stated carbon cost of World Tree ($1.72/tonne) to Cool Earth ($1.34/tonne) and traditional carbon offset programs ($10/tonne). This investment could return a 23% annual return, while the Cool Earth 'investment' would be a loss of 100%. At it's surface, this example does look quite promising when counting both the social utility generated, and the future utility my $20k could do in 10 years time.

Looking forward to posting a more detailed write-up on the space once I'm able, and to hearing your feedback on these ideas!

Hello everyone! I'm new to the EA Forum and it'd be great if I could get some karma so I can start contributing more. :)

This next fall I am running a university EA group. Is there anyone who has run an EA group that has any advice for me other than the basic information on EA Hub? What types of events were the most fun? What types of events were the most effective in gaining members or discussing issues?

Side note: I'd encourage commenters to put a title at the top of their comments (maybe this can be done in the OP).

Has anyone reframed priorities choices (such as x-risk vs. poverty) as losses to check if they’re really biased?

I’m new here. Since I suspect someone has probably already made a similar question somewhere (but I couldn’t find it, sorry), I’m mostly trying to satisfy my curiosity; however, there’s a small probability that it touches an important unsolved dilemma about global priorities and the x-risk vs. safe causes.

I’ve read a little bit about the possibility that preferences for poverty reduction/global health/animal welfare causes over x-risk reduction may be due to some kind of ambiguity-aversion bias. Between donating U$3,000 for (A) saving a life (high certainty, presently) or (B) potentially saving 10^20 future lives (I know, this may be a conservative guess), by making something like a marginal 10^-5 contribution to reducing in 10^-5 some extinction risk, people would prefer the first safe option, despite the large pay-off of the second one. However, such bias is sensitive to framing effects: people usually prefer sure gains and uncertain losses. So, I was trying to find out, without success, if anyone had reframed this decision as matter of losses, to see if one prefers, e.g., (A’) reducing deaths by malaria from 478,001 to 478,000 or (B’) reducing the odds of extinction (minus 10^20 lives) in 10^-10.

Perhaps there’s a better way to reframe this choice, but I’m not interested in discussing one particular example (however, I’m concerned with the possibility that there’s no bias-free way of framing it). My point is that, if one chooses something like A-B’, then we have a strong case for the existence of a bias.

(I’m aware of other objections against x-risk causes, such as Pascal’s mugging and discount rates arguments – but I think they’ve received due attention, and should be discussed separately. Also, I’m mostly thinking about donation choices, not about policy or career decisions, which is a completely different decision; however, IF this experiment confirmed the existence of a bias, it could influence the latter, too.)