Nathan Young
Bio
Participation4
Builds web apps (eg viewpoints.xyz) and makes forecasts. Currently I have spare capacity.
How others can help me
Talking to those in forecasting to improve my forecasting question generation tool
Writing forecasting questions on EA topics.
Meeting EAs I become lifelong friends with.
How I can help others
Connecting them to other EAs.
Writing forecasting questions on metaculus.
Talking to them about forecasting.
Posts 142
Comments2533
Topic contributions20
I agree that it could be easier for people in EA to build a track record that funders take seriously.
I struggle to know if your project is underfunded—many projects aren't great and there have to be some that are rejected. In order to figure that out we have to actually discuss the project and I've appreciated our back and forth on the other blog you posted.
Surely it's going to be much more difficult for a PFG company to raise capital? Stocks are (in some way) related to future profits. If you are locked in to giving 90% away then doesn't that mean that stocks will trade at a much lower price and hence it will be much harder for VCs to get their return?
I guess my questions are:
- "what is earn to give". is the typical ETG giving $1m? $10m? At what point do we want people to switch?
- Is there a genuinely different skill set? Like, are there some people who are very mediocre EA jobs but great at earning money?
My guess would be that people should have some sense of how much they would earn to give for, and then how much impact they would stop earning to give and work for, and then they should move between the two. That would also create some great on-the-job learning, because I imagine that earn-to-give roles teach different skills, which can be fed back into the EA community.
It feels like if there were more money held by EAs some projects would be much easier:
- Lots of animal welfare lobbying
- Donating money to the developing world
- AI lobbying
- Paying people more for work trials
I don't know if there are some people who are much more suited to earning than to doing direct work. It seems to me they're quite similar skill sets. But if they're really sort of at all different, then you should really want quite different people to work on quite different things.
Interesting take. I don't like it.
Perhaps because I like saying overrated/underrated.
But also because overrated/underrated is a quick way to provide information. "Forecasting is underrated by the population at large" is much easier to think of than "forecasting is probably rated 4/10 by the population at large and should be rated 6/10"
Over/underrated requires about 3 mental queries, "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks" "Is it better or worse than my ingroup thinks?" "Am I gonna have to be clear about what I mean?"
Scoring the current and desired status of something requires about 20 queries "Is 4 fair?" "Is 5 fair" "What axis am I rating on?" "Popularity?" "If I score it a 4 will people think I'm crazy?"...
Like in some sense your right that % forecasts are more useful than "More likely/less likely" and sizes are better than "bigger smaller" but when dealing with intangibles like status I think it's pretty costly to calculate some status number, so I do the cheaper thing.
Also would you prefer people used over/underrated less or would you prefer the people who use over/underrated spoke less? Because I would guess that some chunk of those 50ish karma are from people who don't like the vibe rather than some epistemic thing. And if that's the case, I think we should have a different discussion.
I guess I think that might come from a frustration around jargon or rationalists in general. And I'm pretty happy to try and broaden my answer from over/underrated - just as I would if someone asked me how big a star was and I said "bigger than an elephant". But it's worth noting it's a bandwidth thing and often used because giving exact sizes in status is hard. Perhaps we shouldn't have numbers and words for it, but we don't.