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I'm the Founder and Co-director of The Unjournal; We organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.
Previously I was a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, and before that n Economics lecturer/professor for 15 years.
I'm working to impact EA fundraising and marketing; see https://bit.ly/eamtt
And projects bridging EA, academia, and open science.. see bit.ly/eaprojects
My previous and ongoing research focuses on determinants and motivators of charitable giving (propensity, amounts, and 'to which cause?'), and drivers of/barriers to effective giving, as well as the impact of pro-social behavior and social preferences on market contexts.
Podcasts: "Found in the Struce" https://anchor.fm/david-reinstein
and the EA Forum podcast: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast (co-founder, regular reader)
Twitter: @givingtools
Thanks Bob. I agree this would be high value. I've been mainly thinking about human/LLM agreement, but it would be useful to know how consistent each model is, how sensiitive it is to the prompts, whether the models differ in systematic ways, etc.
Actionable takeaways from doing this? Is a 'more stable setup' (one that e.g., has fairly consistent rank orderings) better all else equal, and thus something we should work towards? Probably, as the alternative seems like just 'adding noise'.
Knowing the stability also may tells us how much effort to put into designing and building consensus around a 'reasonable prompt'; if the results are insensitive to this, we shouldn't waste too much time.
Working on implementing something now, at least a first step. I hope to report back on some legible measures of prompt stability (or lack thereof).
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
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest above, and I doubt they market it heavily.
GWWC probably doesn't have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
Tags/backlinks (~testing out this new feature)
@GiveWell @Giving What We Can
Projects I'd like to see
EA Projects I'd Like to See
Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects
Could you expand on the argument for:
This seems like one of the key points, but I don’t completely get what you’re saying and the writing here is highly dense.
The beginning of this post and the image made me think this was going to say that impact markets won’t work and are dead. Yet later on you say “ Impact markets continue to be the best system we know of to coordinate philanthropy at scale” and discuss plans to continue/revive the efforts towards impact markets. Perhaps this could be retitled/respun, as a quick reader might get the wrong impression here.
Is this going in the direction you would suggest? (Happy to co-work on this of course): https://uj-prioritization-prototype.netlify.app/stability/
I see in the paper you mention a possible follow-up being " a friendlier online platform with sliders and buttons to select and tweak the scenarios users want to visualise"
This seems like it would be interesting and helpful to me and something I'd want to try to help out with, but I don't want to overlap this if you're already working on it.
I don't think the Jupyter Notebook as currently linked and hosted is interactive, at least not without some additional user setup.
Hey, one thing I could consider: vibe coding is a version of this that is more interactive, perhaps functioning as some sort of dashboard. Would this be helpful?
(These sorts of things):
https://unjournal.github.io/cm_pq_modeling/ https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
Some clarification questions (which I hope will help people preparing these applications).
For standard grants ($100k-$1m), you say next steps "may include follow-up questions or a direct decision." Roughly how much of the decision do you expect to depend on the EoI text itself? I'd find find it useful to know how much of the case for credibility and theory of change (etc.) needs to fit in 2,000 characters, versus how much can be introduced at a later stage (if one gets there).
Relatedly, is there a mechanism to link to supporting material (a longer scope note a more detailed budget, prior work, etc.), or would you rather it all fits in the 2k character limit?
Your AI governance RFP said the EoI stage focuses mainly on the first three assessment criteria (ToC, track record, strategic judgment), with the rest covered at full review. Is there an analogous shortlist here (going beyond the ITN framework mentioned)?
Yikes, something is wrong here -- I now put it to 50 and it says 0? I'll ask the forum moderators
Quick follow-up: I've worked with Claude Code (several iterations; wanted Fable, got blocked so pushed to Opus) to put up this page comparing and bridging Pablo's model to ours...
This is early -- I continue vetting and working on it and would love your feedback
There's a potential complementarity: we focus on is the cost distribution, Pablo on the demand response is Pablo's
(If you add hypothes.is comments there I'll respond and adapt.)