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Ben_West🔸

16047 karmaJoined Working (15+ years)Panama City, Panama
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CommunityEntrepreneurshipBioethicsSoftware engineeringEffective givingForecasting

Bio

Non-EA interests include chess and TikTok (@benthamite). Formerly @ CEA, METR + a couple now-acquired startups.

How others can help me

Feedback always appreciated; feel free to email/DM me or use this link if you prefer to be anonymous.

Sequences
3

AI Pause Debate Week
EA Hiring
EA Retention

Comments
1199

Topic contributions
6

Poll: Will AI make CS a worse earning path before HL-AGI?
Ben_West🔸2
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Are you asking just about recent graduates, or all graduates?

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Incoming money, integrity, and collective action problems
Ben_West🔸8
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Your conflict of interest here feels enormous (even if declared) and its hard to read this and not feel like it might be a bid to directly protect your own interests by asking others to not step into your turf here as a lobbyist.

I think you could also read it as him attempting to solve the problem he's describing. 

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Effective Altruism Will Be Great Again
Ben_West🔸6
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I would be keen to hear if you think you have any solutions to this birifuction.

Huh, this feels like prime EA territory to me. We need disagreement so that people can engage in key EA activities like "making persnickety critiques of footnote #237 on someone's 10k word forum post."

The case for EA feels much weaker to me if we are all confident that X is the best thing to do - then you should just do X and not worry about cause prio etc.

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CEA's response to sexual harassment
Ben_West🔸*10
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I'm sorry you had to go through this, Fran. 

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How Are EAs Really Doing? Help Us Find Out (~15 min survey)
Ben_West🔸5
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Thanks for doing this. This question is marked as required but I think should either be optional or have a "none" option:
 

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Is salary a helpful proxy for what type of workers are most needed in the EA movement?
Answer by Ben_West🔸7
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To decompose your question into several sub-questions:

  1. Should you defer to price signals for cause prioritization?
    1. My rough sense is that price signals are about as good as the 80th percentile EA's cause prio, ranked by how much time they've spent thinking about cause prioritization.
    2. (This is mostly because most EAs do not think about cause prio very much. I think you could outperform by spending ~1 week thinking about it, for example.)
  2. Should you defer to price signals for choosing between organizations within a given cause?
    1. This mostly seems decent to me. For example, CG struggled to find organizations better than Givewell's top charities for near-termist, human-centric work.
    2. Notable exceptions here for work which people don't want to fund for non-effectiveness reasons, like politics or adversarial campaigning.
  3. Should you defer to price signals for choosing between roles within an organization?
    1. Yes, I mostly trust organizations to price appropriately, although also I think you can just ask the hiring manager.
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The Scaling Series Discussion Thread: with Toby Ord
Ben_West🔸4
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Thanks, that's helpful. Do you have a sense of where we are on the current S-curve? E.g., if capabilities continue to progress in a straight line through the end of this year, is that evidence that we have found a new S-curve to stack on the current one?

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