Mjreard
Bio
Thinking, writing, and tweeting from Berkeley California. Previously, I ran programs at the Institute for Law & AI, worked on the one-on-one advising team at 80,000 Hours in London and as a patent litigator at Sidley Austin in Chicago.
Posts 11
Comments133
The fundamental thing happening here is that the opportunity cost of an exceptionally talented person taking advice aimed at the average person is vastly higher than the inverse, so people give advice that ensures the exceptionally talented lean into ambition and build these fields, even if many non-exceptional people will try and fail.
People are not good at self-assessment in both directions and the more you caveat and qualify your advice, the less it gets through, so this is the bet to make.
However correct or compelling these critiques turn out to be,[1] I want to praise the incredibly constructive framing here. Most 'criticism' on the Forum does not evince 1) the conviction that the underlying problem is still extremely important, 2) the resolve to continue making progress on it, and 3) the trust that actors will update on evidence/arguments. Wonderful.
- ^
FWIW, my summary of the discourse is:
The evidence on shrimp stunning does seem terrifyingly thin
The cage-free controversy is comparatively well studied (but still too little), and very sensitive to assumptions about inputs to quality of life
Meat alternative uptake is a known issue. The question is how long we should keep trying things before deciding the theory of change is fundamentally flawed (much longer, imo!)
I'm also excited about organizers writing their own syllabi. People have different perspectives on what's most fundamental to EA and what the most important framings are. You should facilitate the reading group you'd be excited to join!
To that end, I've [started to] put together some seminal EA content here, from which people can draw.
This is somewhat at odds with fast-launching a fellowship, but if people want to take the time to modestly modify their off-the-shelf options, there is time to do that between launching the application and your first session.
The most charitable explanation of the tension here is that people just disagree with you about what is most impactful. I appreciate your transparency in considering whether aesthetics and nostalgia for a previous era of EA might be driving your unease.
Ultimately, it is better to debate the merits of specific interventions than general vibes. I think even the Anthropic folks would agree that, e.g., moving to SF is purely instrumental to some more specific theory of change that may or may not have merit.
I appreciate the effort and ambition you're putting into this and endorse you doing the kind of outreach you're most excited about. That said, I doubt this is nearly as valuable as it looks on paper, so groups shouldn't default to replicating it.
So what we have here is a pledge that says that when you enter the workforce and have a steady income, you will donate 1% of your income to charities that you care about.
[emphasis added]
Based on this and the absence absence of meaningful follow up, I'd guess these pledges are worth ~5% of 300 high-touch pledges.
It seems like people are going to get an email from GWWC at some point in the future (maybe not even that?) which may or may not successfully remind them of this brief interaction, which may or may not motivate them to click through to the site, which is quite unlikely to convince anyone to donate to a highly effective charity.
Shifting some portion of your efforts to follow up seems like the right move. Getting one real EA 1% pledger up to 5% would be worth 80 of these pledges for example and seems doable.
Limiting to US universities is mostly a me and Sarah consideration. We're American and it's good to focus. I thought about European universities early on, but they were physically and culturally too far away for our high-touch approach.