Mikolaj Kniejski's Quick takes

Make your bets!

My prediction is that AI safety stuff will get more upvotes on LW, and animal welfare stuff will get more upvotes on EAF

I suspect that LW users are much more interested in AI safety and less vegan.

...darn, looks like I'm not gonna beat the house on this one

I'd bet that productivity posts will have more engagement on lesswrong, but apart from that I'd bet with you.

For previous work, I point you to @NunoSempere’s ‘Shallow evaluations of longtermist organizations,’ if you haven’t seen it already. (While Nuño didn’t focus on AI safety orgs specifically, I thought the post was excellent, and I imagine that the evaluation methods/approaches used can be learned from and applied to AI safety orgs.)

Have people recognize you right away. You don't need to tell your name to everyone

This is a VERY huge use case for me. It's so useful!

If someone is in this situation they can just take off their name tag. Security sometimes ask to see it, but you can just take it out of a pocket to show them and put it back

Are you aware of any major conferences that do not use name badges? 

If anything I think names are more important at EAG than other conferences, because you have to locate your 1-1 partners manually each time.

I'm a big fan of names on most badges. But I'd be fine with some fraction of people not having names on their badges, in cases where that might be pragmatic. I also think that pseudonyms can make a lot of sense on occasion. 

I imagine a lot of the downvotes here are on "names are generally a bad idea", rather than "some people should be allowed to not use their names on badges." 

With facial recognition, one could argue that it's the camera more than the badge that poses the OPSEC risk here. If you don't want the broader world to know you attended an event, taking your name off the badge shouldn't make you OK with being photographed.

You might appreciate these reflections too.

This essay is a reconciliation of moral commitment and the good life. Here is its essence in two paragraphs:

Totalized by an ought, I sought its source outside myself. I found nothing. The ought came from me, an internal whip toward a thing which, confusingly, I already wanted – to see others flourish. I dropped the whip. My want now rested, commensurate, amidst others of its kind – terminal wants for ends-in-themselves: loving, dancing, and the other spiritual requirements of my particular life. To say that these were lesser seemed to say, “It is more vital and urgent to eat well than to drink or sleep well.” No – I will eat, sleep, and drink well to feel alive; so too will I love and dance as well as help.

Once, the material requirements of life were in competition: If we spent time building shelter it might jeopardize daylight that could have been spent hunting. We built communities to take the material requirements of life out of competition. For many of us, the task remains to do the same for our spirits. Particularly so for those working outside of organized religion on huge, consuming causes. I suggest such a community might practice something like “fractal altruism,” taking the good life at the scale of its individuals out of competition with impact at the scale of the world.

You might appreciate Ozy Brennan's writeup on capabilitarianism. Contrasting with most flavors of utilitarianism: 

Utilitarians maximize “utility,” which is pleasure or happiness or preference satisfaction or some more complicated thing. But all our ways of measuring utility are really quite bad. Some people use self-reported life satisfaction or happiness, but these metrics often fail to match up with common-sense notions about what makes people better off. GiveWell tends to use lives saved and increased consumption, which are fine as far as they go, but everyone agrees that that’s only a small fraction of what we care about. A lot of people wind up relying basically on intuition, or on heuristics like “I would not like it if I went hungry” or “probably if you give people more money they’ll be happier.”

In my experience, a lot of utilitarians tend to stuff how hard it is to measure utility up into the attic like the first wife in a gothic novel. It is rare to find a work of utilitarian philosophy that comes up with any sort of well-thought-out principled system for determining what people prefer or what brings them pleasure.

The thing I like about capabilitarianism is that it puts its arbitrariness up front. “There are the things we care about!” it says. “These are the things we’re going to be trying to measure! You can argue with us about them if you want.” Nothing is being smuggled in through the back door.

So what is it?

Capabilitarianism is based on the philosophy of Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum. It is consequentialist, but heavily influenced by deontology (especially Kantianism) and virtue ethics (especially Aristotleanism). (If that doesn’t mean anything to you, don’t worry about it.) Capabilitarianism is about making sure people have certain central capabilities. ... Society should make sure that everyone has the central capabilities.

When I say “society should make sure,” I don’t mean “the government should make sure.” While the government has an appropriate role in making sure people can exercise the central capabilities, so do markets, civil society, charities, families, and individuals. Many central capabilities are best met by a combination: for example, the best way to make sure everyone has the “enough food” central capability is a free market in groceries, combined with a robust welfare state to take care of those who can’t afford to buy food on their own.

Finally, what matters is that you have the capability, not that you choose to exercise the capability. If you can’t leave the house, that’s bad. If you legally and socially and physically can leave your house, and freely choose to live the Emily Dickinson lifestyle, that is fine, and capabilitarians have no problem with this.

Ozy reproduces Martha Nussbaum's first-draft list of the central capabilities in their essay; in short: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, senses imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, other species, play, control over one's environment (political and material).

I'm also a broad fan of this sort of direction, but have come to prefer some alternatives. Some points:
1. I believe of this is being done at OP. Some grantmakers make specific predictions, and some of those might be later evaluated. I think that these are mostly private. My impression is that people at OP believe that they have critical information that can't be made public, and I also assume it might be awkward to make any of this public.
2. Personally, I'd flag that making and resolving custom questions for each specific grant can be a lot of work. In comparison, it can be great when you can have general-purpose questions, like, "how much will this organization grow over time" or "based on a public ranking of the value of each org, where will this org be?"
3. While OP doesn't seem to make public prediction market questions on specific grants, they do sponsor Metaculus questions and similar on key strategic questions. For example, there are a tournaments on AI risk, bio, etc. I'm overall a fan of this. 

4. In the future, AI forecasters could do interesting things. OP could take the best ones, then these could make private forecasts of many elements of any program. 

Have you tried Discord? Discord seems absurdly casual for any kind of business or serious use, but that's more about Discord's aesthetics, brand, and reputation than its actual functionality.

My impression when Discord came out was that it copied Slack pretty directly. But Slack was a product for teams at companies to talk to each other and Discord was a tool to make it easier for friends or online communities to play video games together.

Slack is still designed for businesses and Discord is still designed primarily for gamers. But Discord has been adopted by many other types of people for many other purposes.

Discord has voice chat and makes it super easy to switch between servers. Back when people were using Slack as a meeting place for online communities (whereas today they all use Discord), one of my frustrations was switching between teams, as you described.

I think Discord is functionally much better than Slack for many use cases, but asking people to use Discord in a business context or a serious context feels absurd, like holding a company meeting over Xbox Live. If you can get over using a gaming app with a cartoon mascot, then it might be the best solution.

I'm a huge fan of self-hosting and even better writing simple and ugly apps, in my dream world every org would have its resident IT guy who would just code an app that would have all the features they need.