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NB -- this is almost entirely AI generated, with some back and forth prompts and corrections
I'm sharing a steelman against a live assumption in Bay/EA/AIS circles: that large AI-lab-adjacent philanthropy is likely to arrive soon enough, and in a sufficiently usable form, that organizations should plan around it.
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
The stronger skeptical case is that IPOs, valuations, pledges, DAFs, and foundation stakes are several gates away from fast, flexible, AIS/EA-directed grants.
The interactive model lets readers vary assumptions about Anthropic valuation, founder ownership, pledge follow-through, employee giving, OpenAI Foundation allocation, lockups, deployment rates, and grantmaker capacity.
Original motivating thread/comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dtF6wBjH7yBD4kqLz/noah-birnbaum-s-quick-takes?commentId=sGRyGF5wjaaoMFmfK
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Why does the Unjournal Bot keep replying to me? e.g. https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fFDM9RNckMC6ndtYZ/david_reinstein-s-shortform?commentId=9nuWSjdSBZZ9Fw5SH
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Sorry. Let me try to fix this today.
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Some commentary. I mostly agree with the page, but I will focus on the bits where I see room for improvement:
* All 8 gates look correct to me, but they don't all deserve equal emphasis.
* Gate 1 says IPOs have lock-ups. That's true but I basically don't think that matters because lock-ups are very predictable: they will announce how long it is, and that's exactly how long it will be. There's no uncertainty. The main reason it's relevant is that a lockup gives more time for AI valuations to fluctuate or collapse, but the text doesn't even mention this.
* Gate 5 and Gate 7 seem like they're saying the same thing.
* Gate 8 ("Bay social incentives") seems uninteresting since it's not a claim in the same category as the others. It's more like a meta-level reason why people might not think about the other 7 gates.
* Would be cool for the BOTEC to use distributions rather than point estimates. (Squiggle is good for this, and Squigglehub even has a built-in way to have AI generate models.) IMO distributions are a lot more informative than point estimates.
* It looks like the default estimates in the BOTEC are pulled from the sources, but it's not clear which estimates came from which sources. There should be inline citations.
* "Anthropic valuation" variable should specifically be the valuation at the end of the 6-month lockup. Doesn't matter much for a point estimate but it would increase the variance if there variable were a probability distribution.
* Unclear what the "Founder pledge" variable refers to. Is it the % of pledgers' wealth that they've pledged to donate? If so, the default of 80% seems really high?
* "Employee committed pool" is defined in terms of dollars rather than as a % of company valuation, which seems weird. Shouldn't it depend on the value of the equity?
* This model is supposed to illustrate how a lot of people are being too optimistic, but even then, I think most of the point estimates in the model are too optimistic. Consider tha
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Fortnightly AI-wealth tracker — 11 September 2026
* AIS/EA: median modeled end-2027 disbursement $0.83B; 80% model interval $0.16B–$3.0B. Review status: reviewed; unchanged. Named public AI-linked commitments tracked: $0.86B. Tracker and sources.
* Global health and development: median $0.54B; 80% model interval $0.16B–$2.8B. Review status: adjusted. Named public GH&D commitments tracked: $0.31B. GH&D tracker and sources.
Latest news: OpenAI Foundation commits $60M to AI forecasting for smallholder farmers. The confirmed three-year portfolio spans South and Southeast Asia and East Africa. It is a named commitment, not a cash-paid total; the public announcement does not specify the share disbursed by end-2027.
The intervals are deterministic model percentiles, not empirical confidence intervals. Commitment totals may include credits, technical support, cofunding, and multi-year plans; they are not cash-paid totals. Automated fortnightly update from the maintained model.
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Fortnightly AI-wealth tracker — 31 August 2026
* AIS/EA: median modeled end-2027 disbursement $0.83B; 80% model interval $0.16B–$3.0B. Review status: reviewed; unchanged. Named public AI-linked commitments tracked: $0.80B. Tracker and sources.
* Global health and development: median $0.53B; 80% model interval $0.15B–$2.8B. Review status: reviewed; unchanged. Named public GH&D commitments tracked: $0.25B. GH&D tracker and sources.
Latest news: Anthropic opens a $5M wellbeing-evaluations grant program. The program combines direct funding with model access and technical support for independent, open-source evaluations. It is a confirmed commitment, not a completed grant or cash-disbursement record.
The intervals are deterministic model percentiles, not empirical confidence intervals. Commitment totals may include credits, technical support, cofunding, and multi-year plans; they are not cash-paid totals. Automated fortnightly update from the maintained model.
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I totally agree on using distributions, that's something that can be incorporated in, I've done so in other models/interfaces like here for cultured meat. It's by no means straightforward though; the extent to which the uncertainty is dependent/correlated tends to make a big difference.
I guess I see the deterministic 'model' as more of an interface people could use as a starting point, playing around with each parameter interactively and getting a sense of how these disturbances would affect the aggregate forecast.
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(Thanks. Considering each of these, will add them and discuss them in the hosted page, and then request updates.)
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Added and responded to your comments on the page (the hypothesis comments), and then I asked Codex to update to these https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/ ... I haven't inspected the latest version in detail yet, though.
Some highlights of particular interest to @MichaelDickens , Tobias, and readers/modelers
* More citations, tooltips, direct links, and quoted support for key factual claims, greater reasoning transparency, auditing.
* "Updated the model/text in response to his critiques: especially lockup timing, over-optimistic deployment speed, founder pledge ambiguity, OpenAI Foundation treatment, grantmaker capacity, collapse risk, and the need for distributions rather than just point estimates."
* Clarified "the conversion terms are sequential gates", Made “realization,” “follow-through,” “allocation,” and “deployment by end-2026” more distinct, reduced risk it seems like double-adjusting
* Reframe original 'calculator'
* Added a new tab for correlated uncertainty, added shared latent factors such as liquidity plumbing, donor intent, grantmaking capacity, local optimism, and deployment pressure.
* Clearer planning simulator
* Equations/derivations page
* Automated evidence monitor added
* Added a “Submit your estimate” form.
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
NB it may be getting too complicated to oversee for now, we may want to simplify it
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I found the 'founder deployment by end-2026' the hardest to set. It comes a bit as a surprise at the end, as I was already taking into account some considerations before, and the descriptions seem to do as well (e.g. "assets after lockups, taxes, sale timing", and "execution delays").
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I submitted an estimate
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having a think about this.
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OK I think the revised language makes it clerer (see updated version of site ... referring to 'timing gate' etc)
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Biggest (easily-fixable) outstanding issue is I still don't think it makes sense to model deployment by end-2026 because the IPO lockup probably won't have ended by then.
The recent forecasting is overrated post got me thinking:
Solution Seeking a Problem
When talking about forecasting, people often ask questions like “How can we leverage forecasting into better decisions?” This is the wrong way to go about solving problems.
Intuitively, that seems correct, and I've relied on the expression "when you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail." This got me thinking: is it necessarily the wrong way, or is this a truism?
If I have a legitimately useful and powerful tool, isn't it indeed valuable to look around for problems...
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This just came to mind: the reason that it's the wrong way to go about solving problems is that you want to solve the largest problems (well, per resource) and not just solve any random problem. Like, there is a problem that my shoes are currently untied, and I don't want to bend down or spend 10 seconds to tie them, but it's not very important.
So if you want to solve the most important problems, you should start with the problem and then work backwards for what solutions you might wish existed. I think the mere fact that people often talk about forecasting as the solution they are seeking to apply, whether that be Sentinel or whoever, is evidence that things are going wrong.
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Actually, the set of things you want to apply electricity to is far smaller than the set of things you dont want to. For example, if your baby is crying, please dont use electricity.
The problem side should do the searching since they have the shape and exact know-how of the problem
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They do and it’s a powerful point. But on the other hand they may be very much unaware of the nature of available tools and solutions. So I think there should probably be some searching — and listening — in both directions. If it’s done in good faith.
Unjournal AI-assisted research prioritization dashboard (very early prototype)
We've been experimenting with using LLMs to help identify and prioritize research for Unjournal evaluation, to work with and complement human prioritization (and learn). We now have a public prototype dashboard:
uj-prioritization-dashboard.netlify.app
What it does: Automatically discovers recent papers from NBER, arXiv (econ), CEPR, SSRN, Semantic Scholar, EA Forum paper links, and OpenAlex, then scores them using AI models (GPT-5.4 family) against our prioritization criteria — d...
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Very cool.
I work on text parsing / meta science and do a lot of stuff like this on the side and for my lab.
https://docgmedicalsummaries.com/rankings
I've done something similar for ranking clinical medicine articles, it's pretty similar to your site but might be able to share some insights. (might comment more later regardless, just throwing this up for now so I remember).
edit: also signing up will auto subscribe you to emails just to note but should be easy to unsubscribe, can also see how we do rankings without signing up on the landing page.
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Thanks, I'd be up for hearing insights. This is related to a larger project (see https://llm-uj-research-eval.netlify.app/), but this part of it is still pretty early stage.
Will DM
I added some quick polls to this post. I'd love to get some feedback to get a sense of whether we're on the right track and foster discussion. I think the polls also highlight some of the key issues and implications.
State a probability for the underlying policy question:
What's the probability that investing in improving and promoting plant-based ~meat is the most effective farmed animal welfare intervention (at current margins)?
Rate your agreement over the plausibility of existing methods:
Survey and hypothetical choice-experiments are useful for helping us understand whether plant-based meat substitutes for animal products
Demand estimation from supermarket data is useful for helping us understand whether plant-based meat substitutes for animal products
Comparing this to another prominent approach (rate your agreement)
Plant-based meat is more promising than cell-cultured meat for animal welfare
Most visited sites by users of EA Forum
From a quick go on https://pro.similarweb.com/
- 80000hours.org (9% daily cross-visitation)
- lesswrong.com (13% daily cross-visitation)
The rest are about 1.5-5% daily cross-visitation:
- alignmentforum.org
- metaculus.com
- openphilanthropy.org
- givewell.org
- givingwhatwecan.org
- slatestarcodex.com
- jobs.80000hours.org
- app.swapcard.com
- track.toggl.com
- astralcodexten.substack.com
- manifold.markets
- marginalrevolution.com
- agisafetyfundamentals.com
- airtable.com
- openreview.net
- wikiwand.com
- plato.stanford.edu
- openai.com
- cold-takes.com
- archive.ph
- partiful.com
- economist.com
- workflowy.com
- colab.research.google.com
- slowboring.com
- glowfic.com
- arxiv.org
- substack.com
- l.instagram.com
- ourworldindata.org
- roamresearch.com
- ft.com
- meetup.com
- app.clockify.me
- intelligence.org
- towardsdatascience.com
- richardhanania.substack.com
- trello.com
- canva.com
- journals.sagepub.com
- academic.oup.com
- onlinelibrary.wiley.com
- aiimpacts.org
- beta.openai.com
- focusmate.com
- l.messenger.com
- calendly.com
- tandfonline.com
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This is such a predictable and unsurprising set of results that it's adorable.
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Somewhat helpful/useful to me as a sort of recommendation engine ... gonna try some of those sites.
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although tbh there were only 3 or 4 of these sites that I didn't already know or use
Project Idea: 'Cost to save a life' interactive calculator promotion
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
- People might really be interested in this… it’s super-compelling (a bit click-baity, maybe, but the payoff is not click bait)!
- May make some news headlines too (it’s an “easy story” for media people, asks a question people can engage with, etc. … ’how much does it cost to save a life? find out after the break!)
- if people do think it’s much cheaper than it is, as some studies suggest, it would probably be good to change this conception… to help us build a reality-based impact-based evidence-based community and society of donors
- similarly, it could get people thinking about ‘how to really measure impact’ --> consider EA-aligned evaluations more seriously
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest a...
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[This was originally posted as a response in the wrong thread - I've deleted the incorrectly placed response.]
Hi, David,
Thanks for tagging us in this suggestion! We're happy to see people talking about the creation of more compelling resources to correct misperceptions and get people thinking about the true cost of saving a life.
This doesn't seem exactly like what you have in mind, as it was more narrowly focused on GiveWell's recommended charities, but in the past we provided an impact calculator on our site. It allowed users to insert a donation amount and choose a GiveWell top charity to give to, and would return the number of outputs (e.g., nets or vitamin A supplements distributed) and outcomes (e.g., lives saved).
We stopped sharing the impact calculator in November 2021, because we didn't feel confident enough in our ability to produce a useful forward-looking estimate of an individual donation's impact. We now report on the impact of past grants directed by GiveWell (see this spreadsheet, for example, and our 2021 cost per life saved estimates for top charities). We feel that giving the estimated cost per life saved of a past grant to a program serves as a helpful proxy for the impact of a future donation to that same program, even if we can't count on the impact remaining the same.
We've written a bit more about why we focus on backwards-looking impact estimates here and here.
Best,
Miranda Kaplan
GiveWell Communications Associate
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For what it is worth, even people that one might think would know better like professors of international development really get these sort of questions wrong.
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That could also be an interesting promo tag ... 'are you smarter than a professor of international development' :)
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I've thought about something similar. I'm surprised no one has done it yet.
I was thinking you could click on a bunch of different organizations, and it will show the resulting QALY or whatever metric.
Like for example, there'd be a bunch of orgs with nice 'cost to save a life' information, then if you clicked on donating to your university it will display something like the annual interest of your donation as part of the endowment..? Just as a way to illustrate differences in impact.
Meant to post this in funding diversification week. A potential source of new and consistent funds: EA researchers/orgs could run research training programs.
Drawing some of the rents away from universities and keeping it in the system. These could be non-accredited but focus on publicly demonstrable skills and offer tailored letters of recommendation for a limited number of participants. Could train skills and mentor research particularly relevant to EA orgs and funders.
Students (EA and non-EA) would pay for this. Universities and government training funds could also be unlocked.
(More on this later, I think, I have a whole set of plans/notes).
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AIM have already tried to do this for research, and they aren’t sure whether to continue their research fellowship in 2025.. I imagine they’d have some very good learnings on this topic if you got in touch!
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Interesting. But I wonder if they (or anyone) has considered this
... as a source of funding (student fees, government aid if accredited, training subsidies from government and companies)
rather than merely as an outflow?
Modest proposal on a donation mechanism for people doing direct work?
Preamble
Employees at EA orgs and people doing direct work are often also donors/pledgers to other causes. But charitable donations are not always exactly 1-1 deductible from income taxes. E.g., in the USA it’s only deductible if you forgo the standard deduction and ‘itemize your deductions’, and in many countries in the EU there is very limited tax deductibility.
So, if you are paid $1 more by your employer/funded and donate it to the Humane League, Malaria Consortium, etc, the charity only ends up with maybe $0.65 on the margin in many cases. There are ways to do better at this (set up a DAF, bunch your donations…) but they are costly (DAF takes fees) and imperfect (whenever you itemize you lose the standard deduction if I understand.)
Proposal
Funders/orgs (e..g, Open Phil, RP) could agree that employees are allowed relinquish some share of their paycheck into some sort of general fund. The employees who do so are allowed to determine the use of these funds (or ‘advise on’, with the advice generally followed).
Key anticipated concerns, responses
Concern: This will lead ...
Don't talk about simulation theory if you want people to be concerned about AI safety?
I watched Roman Yampolsky on Diary of a CEO https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UclrVWafRAI&list=WL&index=2
I found him very credible and convincing. And he was making some strong arguments. My lizard brain thought, "This guy is talking seriously; he's not wearing any silly hats or making goofy facial expressions."
Then at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UclrVWafRAI&list=WL&index=2&t=3370s He was asked about simulation theory, and he said he thinks it's alm...
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I'm not sure that immediately jumping to critiquing the messaging makes sense here.
If hearing someone’s strong belief in simulation theory lowers your trust in their AI safety views, the 'obvious' first step seems to be to lower your trust in Yampolsky's AI safety views.
And if the simulation theory makes AI safety feel less motivating, the 'obvious' first step seems to be to reduce your motivation in proportion to how credible you find the theory.
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Fair, I guess that's getting a bit more towards soldier rather than scout mentality.
But I suspected that this part of my reaction was largely emotional and irrational. Especially the 'drop in the bucket' aspect.
EA Forum Question posts with 50+ karma that seemed promising for finding 'Pivotal Questions'
David R: In general I don’t think all of these questions/question posts themselves contain pivotal questions. But some of them seem promising, and in others the responses seem to generate potential pivotal questions.
Should we push for a rapid malaria vaccine rollout? — EA Forum Bots
What EA projects could grow to become megaprojects, eventually spending $10...
Imposter (syndrome) ?
Building on my response to the Don't think just apply thread.
... It reminded me of my thoughts on the ‘imposter syndrome’.
I think there are many people who are under-confident in their abilities, both overall, and in relation to other people. Perhaps this disproportionally tends to affect people in the EA and rationalist community, because we are more introspective and skeptical.
But there are also people in this world who are in some way ‘imposters’, in the sense that they don’t have the training for their position, or they (or their organization) is claiming much more than they are actually doing. In some cases it is useful for these people and orgs to consider “how can we level up our abilities and accomplishments, and moderate our claims?"[1]
This is also real, and we don’t want to convey that “everyone who thinks they are over their heads/over-claiming is merely suffering from imposter syndrome”. Maybe some have IS, but some are actually having a meaningful and useful insight that they can benefit from… if not paralyzed by inaction and shame.
This ‘not everything is IS’ also applies to considering individuals and companies making big claims,...
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I really like those points!
I agree this is an important message for some people and circumstances. For instance, it would probably have been a good message for me when I started doing research on longtermist strategy (from an s-risk perspective) in 2014-2017. I mostly pushed through impostor syndrome because there weren't many other people doing similar things, so it felt like "I know it's bad but, looking around, it may just be good enough to be useful." In hindsight, I think the feeling was telling me that I should have focused less on searching for conclusions (by "winging it") and more on improving my understanding and skill building. (That said, "searching for conclusions" is a crucial habit and people should be trying it with some amount of their attention from the very start, otherwise it's difficult to acquire it later.)
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The Dunning-Kruger effect is real. But with a few basic sanity checks, I believe any thoughtful EA can determine whether it's imposter syndrome vs actual under-qualification.
If you have evidence to support your non-trivial investment in the area—classes, degrees, self-directed learning, projects, jobs—you are probably at least qualified for an entry-level position in a given area.
Probably the easiest way to check is by asking an impartial 3rd party, like an 80kH Advisor, or even just someone who already has experience working in that field.
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Note that this is heavily contested. A lot of the observed phenomenon in the studies (qualitatively: incompetent people thinking they're average, great people thinking they're only good) can be explained by "better than average" effect + metrics not being perfect + natural mean regression.
And of course pop science accounts of Dunning-Kruger is even more unhinged than what D-K claimed.
My own best guess is that the claimed effect is real but small.
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Me: “The Dunning-Kruger effect is real.”
Linch: “…the claimed effect is real…”
Great to know that we are in agreement, Linch! The logical follow-up question is what other factor(s) has (have) a higher impact on the effect?
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Interesting. Of course my point is independent of the D-K effect, although that would enhance it.
I’m not saying worse ppl are more. overconfident. I’m just saying ‘some ppl are overconfident or overstating’
I’m also suggesting to there may be a secular overstatement of abilities and accomplishments in some fields. Less so among EAs I suspect.
ImpactMatters acquired by CharityNavigator; but is it being incorporated/presented/used in a good way?
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I spent a few minutes looking at the impact feature, and I... will also go with "not satisfied".
From their review of Village Enterprise:
My charitable interpretation is that the "$0.85" number is meant to represent one year's income, and to imply a higher number over time (e.g. you have new skills or a new business that boosts your income for years to come).
But I also think it's plausible that "$0.85" is meant to refer to the total increase, such that you could score "75" by running a program that, in your own estimation, helps people less than just giving them money.
(The "lowest score is 50" element puzzled me at first, but this page clarifies that you score "0" if CN can't find enough information to estimate your impact in the first place.)
*****
Still, this is much better than the original CN setup, and I hope this is an early beta version with many improvements on the way.
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There was some discussion of the original acquisition here.
Historically, Charity Navigator has been extremely hostile to effective altruism, as you probably know, so perhaps this isn't surprising.
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Thank you, I had not seen Luke Freeman @givingwhatwecan's earlier post
That 2013 opinion piece/hit job is shocking. But that was 9 years ago or so.
I doubt CN would have acquired IM just to bury it; there might be some room for positive suasion here.
Re "pivotal questions"...
Some thoughts on what The Unjournal (unjournal.org) can offer, cf existing EA-aligned research orgs (naturally, there are pros and cons)
... both in terms of defining and assessing the 'pivotal questions/claims', and in evaluating specific research findings that most inform these.
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Non-EA-aligned expertise and engagement: We can offer mainstream (not-EA aligned) feedback and evaluation, consulting experts who might not normally come into this orbit. We can help engage non-EA academics in the priorities and considerations relevant t
Thinking of trying to re-host innovationsinfundraising.org, which I stopped hosting maybe a year ago. Not sure I have the bandwidth to keep it updated as a ~living literature review, but the content might be helpful to people.
You can see some of the key content on the wayback machine, e.g., the table of evidence/consideration of potential tools .
Any thoughts/interest in using this or collaborating on a revival (focused on the effective giving part)?
This, along with the barriers to effective giving might (or might not) also be a candidate for Open Phi...
There are quite a few posts/some discussion on
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The value of language learning for career capital
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The dominance of English in EA and the advantages it confers
I expect these issues to become less important very soon as new AI-powered technology gets better. To an extent, the Babblefish is already here and nearly use...
Also source of consciousness ("which configurations of matter are conscious?") seems a bit different from moral status ("which configurations of matter do we care about?").
A paperclip maximiser could have consciousness, that doesn't have to mean we care too much about it or are willing to sacrifice our lives to ensure its survival.
But why not? How do we justify that?
Basically I think humans just care about anything that looks similar to human beings. (Which makes sense evolutionarily.)
That may be what we do care about, but how can we justify that in terms of what we should care about?
Sports betting promotion capture for charity
I pledge to donate 70% of the net gain to effective charities immediately or within the year 2022. - David Reinstein
I’ll try to follow the guidelines given in the post here: EA Fundraising Through Advantage Sports Betting: A Guide ($500/Hour in Select States) - EA Forum
5 Feb 2022
I'm driving up to upstate New York today to visit my dad and take advantage of the promotions and staying through the weekend. I live about 11-2 hours from the NYS border so I can return for a followup if necessary.
… in order to dona...
This year's Nobel prizes for Physics and for Chemistry went to computer scientists (among others).
Previous prizes have stretched the discipline boundaries, e.g., the Economics Prize for Ostrom (poli sci) and Kahnemann (psych).
Probably because the prize categories are not set optimally to maximize their goal
Those who, during the preceding year, shall have conferred the greatest benefit on mankind
... especially as the world has progressed.
The current categories are: Physics, Chemistry, Physiology or Medicine, Literature, Economics (*slightly different pr...
When you say "feeling", are you referring to conscious experience of the AI, or mechanistic positive and negative signals?
The former. The latter has no moral patienthood I guess
- If consciousness, super-high uncertainty on what consciousness even is, what the correct ontology for it is. But can be discussed.
I've been reading more about this and I realize there is great disagreement
If positive and negative reward signals, then AI today already runs based on positive and negative reward signals as you mention.
Of course, but their 'concious experie...
"Room for more funding": A critique/explanation
Status: WIP, rough, needs consolidating
David Reinstein: I have argued against this idea of 'room for more funding' as a binary thing. generally imagine in these areas there is always room for more funding, at least in the horizon of a year or more.
It's just a combination of
- diminishing returns, perhaps past a threshold of 'these interventions are better than alternatives'
- limited capacity because of short-run constraints that take some time to adjust (hire more staff, negotiate more vaccine access, assess new
Skills/training/EA jobs, 'Should you do an Economics PhD (or masters… see later)'; what do you need to learn to work at an EA org? How to level up on this stuff and prove value
These were the most frequent questions I got and discussions I had at the conference, mainly with UG students, but also with people at career pivot points. (Maybe the second-biggest was from PhD students and academics looking to learn more about EA and RP, and to have more impact)
I'm working on an essay/post/resource answering these questions and giving my opinions and experience &nb...
EA aligned version of "Oxfam stores" ... in the USA+
I used to buy a lot and give away a lot of stuff at Oxfam stores in the UK. I don’t agree with all of the approaches and campaigns but I think that they do a great deal of good. I think that before their prostitution scandal broke the stores were earning about £20 million per year.
Do we have anything like that in the US? We have Goodwill and the Salvation Army but those are doing domestic charity only and thus an order of magnitude less effective, I suspect.
This made me think: would there be any value...
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This is a really interesting idea! I'm very fond of charity shops so I love the idea of making ones for EA charities. I have no idea how easy or hard it is to do and how it compares to other fundraising tactics, but it seems like it could have a big impact both from profits and from raising awareness. It could be a good thing to do for people with experience starting or running shops.
General notes on "Sports Betting for EA" … and ‘ways to (not) screw it up’
Some lessons from my experiment and understanding (writing up my experience HERE, when I get a a chance)
As written elsewhere, there are basically 2-3 types of rewards.
- The "deposit match" rewards give you some house money (“bonus”) when you sign up and make yout first deposit. The ones I've seen will give you this house money in an amount equal to the amount you deposited on that first deposit.
- Risk-free bets: When you start an account and make a deposit,&
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Thanks so much for sharing these tips! With regards to the info on OddsJam:
* I use the app "Todoreminder" to remind myself to cancel subscriptions like this.
* You can always buy a $10 visa gift card online and register with that instead of your credit card if you're worried about forgetting to cancel your subscription.
* If you're using OddsJam premium, I wouldn't worry about betting on specific sports. OddsJam will show you where the best bets are for the sports book you're betting with accounting for the vig. Generally speaking though, you're right that two-way markets (meaning only two outcomes can happen) take less vig than futures markets (e.g., the winner of this year's NBA championship) or three-way markets (like soccer where a game can end in a tie).
Modest proposal on a donation mechanism for people doing direct work?
(Tag: Donations, efficiency, taxes, administrative innovation)
Preamble
Employees at EA orgs and people doing direct work are often also donors/pledgers to other causes. But charitable donations are not always exactly 1-1 deductible from income taxes. E.g., in the USA it’s only deductible if you forgo the standard deduction and ‘itemize your deductions’, and in many countries in the EU there is very limited tax deductibility.
So, if you are paid $1 more by your employer/fun...
AI consciousness and valenced sensations: unknowability?
Variant of Chinese room argument? This seems ironclad to me, what am I missing:
My claims:
Claim: AI feelings are unknowable: Maybe an advanced AI can have positive and negative sensations. But how would we ever know which ones are which (or how extreme they are?
Corollary: If we cannot know which are which, we can do nothing that we know will improve/worsen the “AI feelings”; so it’s not decision-relevant
Justification I: As we ourselves are bio-based living things, we can infer from the apparent sensat...
Are you engaging in motivated reasoning ... or çommitting other reasoning fallacies?
I propose the following good epistemic check using Elicit.org's "reason from one claim to another" tool
Whenever you have a theory that
Feed this tool your theory, negating one side or the other[1]
and/or
And see if any of the arguments it presents seem equally plausible to your arguments for
If so, believe your arguments and conclusion less.
Caveat: the tool is not working great yet, and often requires a few rounds of...
I'm
- reading EA forum posts
- and comments
- and some links
- and adding some comments/thoughts of my own
HERE (podcast 'found in the struce' available on all platforms).
I think this will help people who have limited screen time get more from the EA Forum.
I’d like to encourage others to also narrate/record forum posts. I would love to listen to this too on those long drives/walks.
Posts I bookmarked (often as references)
What are examples of EA work being reviewed by non-EA researchers?QAaron Gertler, cole_haus
Altruistic Agency – free tech expertise for effective altruistsMarkus Amalthea Magnuson
Pedant, a type checker for Cost Effectiveness AnalysisHazelfire
How to find EA documents on a particular topicJc_Mourrat
2-week summer course in "economic theory and global prioritization": LMK if interested!trammell
Learnings about literature review strategy from research practice sessionsalexlintz
Facebook ads: can you really do A/B testing on a comparable audience?
On Facebook ‘Lift testing’
… can you really compare ‘ad A vs ad B’ to see which works better on a comparable audience?
Braun and Schwartz (Hat tip, Josh Lewis)… seem to think this is NOT possible in the current FB setup (and maybe not on most platforms either). ... Because of the way each ad design is separately targeted/optimized to its ‘best audience’.
Smartly seems to imply that multi-cell lift tests do not suffer from this problem.
... But it's unclear if this really implements 'target...
What Economics research is EA-relevant?
Most of Economic research can be deemed EA-relevant in a general sense in that it usually focuses on welfare properties (of equilibria)…
But sometimes it’s the ‘potential pareto improvement/2nd welfare theorem’ stuff … could make the ‘pie higher’ and achieve any improved outcome you like it were to be redistributed.
E.g., one could claim (loosely)
A. … “efficient antitrust regulation is an EA cause because it aims to achieve the greatest level of Consumer + Producer surplus”
B. “…which could then yield the greatest ...
On music streaming services
(Note: I am not making a claim that this is an EA cause candidate.)
Music is an "information good". It is "nonrival" and infinitely and freely sharable. Any positive price leads to "allocative inefficiency".
But a zero price obviously gives no incentive to produce and share music. The best solution is to separate what consumers pay from what musicians receive. The music (and all media and info) would be free to access, but the creators would get a payment equal to the value the listeners and users took from it.
But it's hard to
9
As one data point, I'd gladly pay an extra $5-15/month for a "tier" of Spotify that passed along, say, 90% of that extra money to artists. Spotify being mostly private makes it hard to get good digital bling from a higher-tier option, but maybe artists could offer extra rewards to people in that tier?
Much more simply, I'd love to have a "tip the artist" option next to any song, so that when I was especially appreciating something, I could tip the artist a dollar. I'd probably use that option 100-200 times/year.
This seems like it should be a win for Spotify — I see few people angry about Spotify making/keeping too much money, lots of people angry about artists being underpaid. And I think it should be possible to design a tier/tip option that sends the message "you're funding artists" without "we're not".
From some brief research, Spotify paid out over $5 billion to "rights holders"* in 2020 and grossed about $9 billion (they claim to pay out 70% of all revenue). And they have 6500 employees. All of these seem like reasonable numbers, and even boosting artist revenue by 20% would probably feel tiny to critics — now it's half a cent per stream instead of 0.4 cents, hooray — while being a pretty sharp cut for their staff/technical infrastructure.
*Note that this includes record labels; for many artists, Spotify's rate isn't nearly as problematic as the % their record labels take.
US election question/take.
Do people in the EA (and maybe rationalist) community have any particular levers we could pull or superpowers that could persuade key influencers and voters?
E.g., Joe Rogan might be able to tip this election. He shows some signs of thoughtfulness and reasoning (at time). Does anyone “here” have a useful connection to him?
NB -- this is almost entirely AI generated, with some back and forth prompts and corrections
I'm sharing a steelman against a live assumption in Bay/EA/AIS circles: that large AI-lab-adjacent philanthropy is likely to arrive soon enough, and in a sufficiently usable form, that organizations should plan around it.
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
Original motivating thread/comment: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/dtF6wBjH7yBD4kqLz/noah-birnbaum-s-quick-takes?commentId=sGRyGF5wjaaoMFmfK
@Noah Birnbaum
Sorry. Let me try to fix this today.