I assume it's the one I linked in my original post? Catherine announced it was discontinued. :/

Should the EA Forum facilitate donation swaps? 🤔 Judging from the number of upvotes on this recent swap ask and the fact that the old donation swap platform has retired, maybe there's some unmet demand here? I myself would like to swap donations later this year. Maybe even a low-effort solution (like an open thread) could go a long way?

My experience from the church is the salary doesn't correlate will with likelihood of donating, although it does of course correlate with donating larger amounts of money.

Yes, though I thought maybe among EAs there would be some correlation. 🤷

I think I was assuming people working in highly paid AI jobs were donating larger percentages of their income, but I haven't seen data in either direction?

Yeah, me neither (which, again, is probably true; just not in my circles).

Am I wrong that EAs working in AI (safety, policy, etc.) and who are now earning really well (easily top 1%) are less likely to donate to charity?

At least in my circles, I get the strong impression that this is the case, which I find kind of baffling (and a bit upsetting, honestly). I have some just-so stories for why this might be the case, but I'd rather hear others' impressions, especially if they contradict mine (I might be falling prey to confirmation bias here since the prior should be that salary correlates positively with likelihood of donating among EAs regardless of sector).

Sharing this talk I gave in London last week titled "The Heavy Tail of Valence: New Strategies to Quantify and Reduce Extreme Suffering" covering aspects of these two EA Forum posts:

• Quantifying the Global Burden of Extreme Pain from Cluster Headaches
• The Quest for a Stone-Free World: Chanca Piedra (Phyllanthus niruri) as an Acute and Prophylactic Treatment for Kidney Stones and Their Associated Extreme Negative Valence

I welcome feedback! 🙂

Oh god that's a huge preview. OK.

Thanks for writing this! Coincidentally, my talk "The Heavy Tail of Valence: New Strategies to Quantify and Reduce Extreme Suffering" just went online a couple of hours ago. I thought you might like it ☺️ 

Thanks, Hasan! :)

Obviously I want to be cautious about making such a recommendation. 😅 But I'm confident enough in our data (pointing at chanca piedra being safer than e.g. melatonin) that I myself take 500mg once a week, but mostly because (a) that was the default recommended dosage on the bottle I got, and (b) I thought taking it daily would be an overkill given that I think I'm at very low risk. But I could see the rationale for taking it daily for one month per year, as you suggest. Or maybe doing both?

Thanks, Henry. Your care, as a doctor, for people's wellbeing shines through! We'd also hate to learn that this herb causes e.g. delayed, severe side effects. We hope this question can be settled for good asap given the scope and severity of the suffering involved here!

We start our post acknowledging that online reviews are not usually a reliable source of information concerning medical matters. So we asked ourselves: if there was a statistically significant signal, how could we possibly find it? This is what motivated us to:

• Compare reviews across three different platforms (WebMD, Amazon, Reddit).
• Compare reviews of chanca piedra to reviews of other kidney stone treatments within those same platforms.
• Compare reviews of other popular supplements within those same platforms (e.g., ashwagandha, melatonin).
• Do sub-analyses of the data, e.g. looking only at the most credible reviews and reading closely any reviews mentioning any severe or rare side effects (which we report).
• Look into whatever literature we could find about chanca piedra to see if mechanistic explanations were compatible with our findings.

Would an analysis of Reddit and Amazon reviews of thalidomide have revealed its negative effects? Bex powder? Diethylstilbestrol? Betel nut?

Not necessarily, no. But if we had access to thousands of anecdotes and reviews of these medications dating back to 2008, including by people who have taken them for years, the chances would go up significantly. I guess that's our main "selling point".

In the end, our goal is to reduce as much extreme suffering as possible. If it turns out that taking chanca piedra actually increases extreme suffering, we'd want to be the first ones to know! But from what we can tell, that hypothesis is looking very unlikely.

I really appreciate your feedback and your questions! 🙏

I'd love to reply in detail but it would take me a while. 😅 But maybe two quick points:

1. On observer independence: The main challenge that computational functionalism faces (IMO) is that there's no principled way to say "THIS is the (observer-independent) system I posit to be conscious" because algorithms, simulations, etc. don't have clearly-defined boundaries. It's up to us (as conscious agents) to arbitrarily determine those boundaries, so anything goes! The section "Is simulation an intrinsic property?" in this post sums it up quite neatly, I think. Field topology, as well as, say, entanglement networks, do give us observer-independent boundaries.
2. On the simulation behaving identically to the brain: Here I think one could reasonably ask: What if, in order for the simulation to behave identically, we had to simulate the brain even at the smallest physical scale? Many people think this isn't necessary and that the "neuron as digital switches" abstraction is enough. But say we actually had to simulate EM field phenomena, quantum phenomena, etc. Then I think runtime complexity matters, since maybe some parts of the brain can be simulated easily and others take millions of years. Can one bootstrap a coherent simulation from that? Now imagine trying to simulate multiple brains interacting with each other, running physics experiments, etc. Can one set up the simulation such that e.g. they all measure the speed of light to be the same? Or otherwise always get the same experimental results? I kind of doubt so. But regardless, the previous point about observer dependence would still stand.