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leillustrations🔸

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I think we should celebrate doing things which are better than not doing that thing, even if we don't know what the counterfactual would have been. For example:

  • When a friend donates to charity, I show appreciation, not ask him how sure he is that it was the best possible use of his money
  • When my relative gets a good grade, I congratulate her - I don't start questioning if she really prioritised studying for the right subject
  • When a server is nice to me, I thank them - I don't ask them why they're talking to me instead of serving someone else

I appreciate that transparency might never be on the top of your to do list, and that might be the correct decision. But when an organisation is transparent, that's a public good - it helps me and the community make better decisions about how I want to do good, and I want them to know it helped me. 

Public goods have this slightly annoying feature of being disincentivised, because they helps everyone, often at the cost of those providing the good. In an ideal world EAs would all do it anyway because we're perfect altruists, but we still respond to incentives like everyone else. This is why I don't think we need to go around asking eg. who has sent the best funding applications, even though that can often be more important than being transparent. 

I'd love to talk about other important public goods that we should celebrate!

Would you be up for making your "deaths of effective altruism" article available in a way that isn't paywalled?

In terms of EA charities most commonly cited in these areas only, I think global health charities are much more well evidenced.

I think the most effective animal welfare interventions are probably more effective, I'm just much less sure what they are.

Thanks for your work here! I can see that the data here is limited, and I think that makes projects like this much harder but still very valuable. 

A couple of questions/suggestions: 

  • I'm unable to find any .csv's to download on that page. Could you point out where they are?
  • It looks to me like all the data you have is at the country level – is this correct?
    •  I'm generally a big fan of geospatial work, but I'm not sure its helping in your case. It becomes quickly confusing if I turn on more than one layer at once, and I can't see any of the correlations you discuss.
    • You say: "layer overlapping, statistical variable calculations using GeoDa software, and interpolation were used to search for relevant indicators for spatial analysis" – can you specify what you did here? 

At the risk of sounding naive: I'd like to point out you can go work for a frontier AI company and give lots of money to AI safety (or indeed any other cause area you believe in). 

If nothing else, if you give at least the salary difference between a frontier job and a lower-pay non-frontier AI safety job, this prevents you from lying to yourself: thinking you are working at a frontier company because you believe its good, while actually doing it because of the benefits to you.

This is great! I think its extremely important and underrated (dare I say 'neglected'?) work to identify and shift resources towards more effective charities in smaller contexts, even if those charities are unlikely to be the most globally effective.

Are you able to share more of your analysis or data? I'm curious about the proportion of charities in the categories you identify above, and what, if any numerical/categorical values you assigned.

Upvoted because -50 karma strikes me as excessive for a joke (even if in poor taste)

  • Presentations from any of the individuals who work on evaluation, getting "into the weeds" of how decisions are made, and recent work
  • Presentations from Givewell grantees on what they're currently working on
  • Bill / Melinda Gates, or otherwise someone from the Gates foundation
  • Elon Musk, or people from Tesla, Neuralink, and SpaceX
  • People from pharmaceutical companies
  • Board members of EVF
  • Sal Khan
  • A talk from successful edutainment/social media people who discuss EA-adjacent ideas like CGP Grey, Kurzgesagt, etc. (who did not necessarily start out EA-funded)
  • Podcast interviewers who discuss EA-relevant content, eg. Ezra Klein (as already mentioned), Lex Fridman, Joe Rogan.
  • People running non-cause area EA interest groups, eg. SEADS, High Impact [Engineers, Law, Professionals, Medicine, etc], Religious EA groups, on what they're working on/how EA is different in their communities

I suspect you would get a much wider applicant pool for EAGxSingapore if it were a week later.

The time requirements (<10 hours/week for most roles for most of the process, then full-time the week of the conference) is not really viable for most working professionals, and more suited to students who would be on winter break - but it looks like NUS (Singapore), Ateneo de Manila University and De La Salle University (Phillipines), and Fulbright University (Vietnam), ie. the (I think) majority of the EA university groups in South East Asia, have school terms going up to the week of the conference.

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