From Bostrom's website, an updated "My Work" section reads:
... That’s why I founded the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University in 2005. FHI brought together an interdisciplinary bunch of brilliant (and eccentric!) minds, and sought to shield them as much as possible from the pressures of regular career academia; and thus were laid the foundations for exciting new fields of study.
Those were heady years. FHI was a unique place - extremely intellectually alive and creative - and remarkable progress was made. FHI was also quite fertile, spawning a number of academic offshoots, nonprofits, and foundations. It helped incubate the AI safety research field, the existential risk and rationalist communities, and the effective altruism movement. Ideas and concepts born within this small research center have since spread far and wide, and many of its alumni have gone on to important positions in other institutions.
Today, there is a much broader base of support for the kind of work that FHI was set up to enable, and it has basically served out its purpose. (The local faculty administrative bureaucracy has also become increasingly stifling.) I think those who were there during its heyday will remember it fondly. I feel privileged to have been a part of it and to have worked with the many remarkable individuals who flocked around it. [Update: FHI officially closed on 16 April 2024]
I’m a researcher on voting theory, with a focus on voting over how to divide a budget between uses. Sorry I found this post late, so probably things are already decided but I thought I’d add my thoughts. I’m going to assume approval voting as input format.
There is an important high-level decision to make first regarding the objective: do we want to pick charities with the highest support (majoritarian) or do we want to give everyone equal influence on the outcome if possible (proportionality)?
If the answer is “majoritarian”, then the simplest method makes the most sense: give all the money to the charity with the highest approval score. (This maximizes the sum of voter utilities, if you define voter utility to be the amount of money that goes to the charities a voter approves.)
If the answer is “proportionality”, my top recommendation would be to drop the idea of having only 3 winners and not impose a limit, and instead use the Nash Product rule to decide how the money is split [paper, wikipedia]. This rule has a nice interpretation where let’s say there are 100 voters, then every voter is assigned 1/100th of the budget and gets a guarantee that this part is only spent on charities that the voter has approved. The exact proportions of how the voter share is used is decided based on the overall popularity of the charities. This rule has various nice properties, including Pareto efficiency and strong proportionality properties (guaranteeing things like “if 30% of voters vote for animal charities, then 30% of the budget will be spent on animal charities”).
If you want to stick with the 3 winner constraint, there is no academic research about this exact type of voting situation. But if proportionality is desired, I would select the 3 winners as not the 3 charities with the highest vote score, but instead use Proportional Approval Voting [wikipedia] to make the selection. This would avoid the issue that @Tetraspace identified in another comment, where there is a risk that all 3 top charities are similar and belong to the largest subgroup of voters. Once the selection of 3 charities is done, I would not split the money in proportion to approval scores but either (a) split it equally, or (b) normalize the scores so that a voter who approved 2 of the 3 winners contributes 0.5 points to each of them, instead of 1 point to each. Otherwise those who approved 2 out of 3 get higher voting weight.
I don't think that's right. Half the fishes sold to humans for consumption are farmed, but if I understand correctly, a lot of caught fishes are used as feed in farms. Those fishes used for feed will also be relatively smaller and therefore more numerous. So I expect it to indeed be an order of magnitude error.
As far as I can tell, "3-8 billion killed fish" figure indeed refers to caught fishes, not to farmed fishes (following the links it comes about from the classic 3 trillion / year estimate; http://fishcount.org.uk/published/std/fishcountstudy.pdf). I think that this part of the article is misleading; the relevant number would be the total count of fishes living in farms at any given time, as well as the number of farm slaughters.
Interesting that the 80k book is so popular. Is this the book that came out in late 2016, or has the content been updated? If not, it may be worth doing a second edition, since I assume that 80k's thinking has evolved significantly since publication.
Kelsey's messages are written in a style of informality that strongly suggests a casual conversation with a friend, and not a formal interview with a journalist. The emoji reactions have a similar effect, and there isn't an introductory message along the lines of "would you be happy to talk to vox". This overall seemed somewhat manipulative to me.
"Our sense is we’re able to generate >2x more value per time with our other activities [than with open calls]": does this number include an estimate of the time spent by regrantors? (Even if it doesn't, the 2x figure is still interesting.)
The publishing arm was sold to Wiley for £572 million, so it probably will be difficult to buy it back. I would guess that the deal would have included something like a transfer of a trademark, which would make it difficult to restart publishing afresh under the name Blackwell's.
From Bostrom's website, an updated "My Work" section reads:
I’m a researcher on voting theory, with a focus on voting over how to divide a budget between uses. Sorry I found this post late, so probably things are already decided but I thought I’d add my thoughts. I’m going to assume approval voting as input format.
There is an important high-level decision to make first regarding the objective: do we want to pick charities with the highest support (majoritarian) or do we want to give everyone equal influence on the outcome if possible (proportionality)?
If the answer is “majoritarian”, then the simplest method makes the most sense: give all the money to the charity with the highest approval score. (This maximizes the sum of voter utilities, if you define voter utility to be the amount of money that goes to the charities a voter approves.)
If the answer is “proportionality”, my top recommendation would be to drop the idea of having only 3 winners and not impose a limit, and instead use the Nash Product rule to decide how the money is split [paper, wikipedia]. This rule has a nice interpretation where let’s say there are 100 voters, then every voter is assigned 1/100th of the budget and gets a guarantee that this part is only spent on charities that the voter has approved. The exact proportions of how the voter share is used is decided based on the overall popularity of the charities. This rule has various nice properties, including Pareto efficiency and strong proportionality properties (guaranteeing things like “if 30% of voters vote for animal charities, then 30% of the budget will be spent on animal charities”).
If you want to stick with the 3 winner constraint, there is no academic research about this exact type of voting situation. But if proportionality is desired, I would select the 3 winners as not the 3 charities with the highest vote score, but instead use Proportional Approval Voting [wikipedia] to make the selection. This would avoid the issue that @Tetraspace identified in another comment, where there is a risk that all 3 top charities are similar and belong to the largest subgroup of voters. Once the selection of 3 charities is done, I would not split the money in proportion to approval scores but either (a) split it equally, or (b) normalize the scores so that a voter who approved 2 of the 3 winners contributes 0.5 points to each of them, instead of 1 point to each. Otherwise those who approved 2 out of 3 get higher voting weight.
I'm happy to discuss further.
I don't think that's right. Half the fishes sold to humans for consumption are farmed, but if I understand correctly, a lot of caught fishes are used as feed in farms. Those fishes used for feed will also be relatively smaller and therefore more numerous. So I expect it to indeed be an order of magnitude error.
As far as I can tell, "3-8 billion killed fish" figure indeed refers to caught fishes, not to farmed fishes (following the links it comes about from the classic 3 trillion / year estimate; http://fishcount.org.uk/published/std/fishcountstudy.pdf). I think that this part of the article is misleading; the relevant number would be the total count of fishes living in farms at any given time, as well as the number of farm slaughters.
Interesting that the 80k book is so popular. Is this the book that came out in late 2016, or has the content been updated? If not, it may be worth doing a second edition, since I assume that 80k's thinking has evolved significantly since publication.
Kelsey's messages are written in a style of informality that strongly suggests a casual conversation with a friend, and not a formal interview with a journalist. The emoji reactions have a similar effect, and there isn't an introductory message along the lines of "would you be happy to talk to vox". This overall seemed somewhat manipulative to me.
I believe this is SBF's blog: http://measuringshadowsblog.blogspot.com/
"Our sense is we’re able to generate >2x more value per time with our other activities [than with open calls]": does this number include an estimate of the time spent by regrantors? (Even if it doesn't, the 2x figure is still interesting.)
The publishing arm was sold to Wiley for £572 million, so it probably will be difficult to buy it back. I would guess that the deal would have included something like a transfer of a trademark, which would make it difficult to restart publishing afresh under the name Blackwell's.
For zoom, when scheduling a meeting and marking it as “recurring”, the link should stay valid indefinitely.