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MBlume comments on The Craigslist Revolution: a real-world application of torture vs. dust specks OR How I learned to stop worrying and create one billion dollars out of nothing - Less Wrong
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Comments (219)
I think this is a very strange situation. There's a billion dollar bill in the middle of the road, and it's been there for four years. Yes, we should figure out how we can pick it up, and use it to purchase utilons, but I think as a sub-question, we really really need to figure out why it hasn't been picked up. Because what Kevin is proposing sounds easy. I spend time on Facebook, and I've been invited to, and often joined, a ridiculous number of advocacy groups -- one million strong for Darfur, support breast cancer awareness, etc. I do not understand how a group hasn't already been started to claim this money for some popular cause, and I don't think we're going to be able to claim it ourselves unless we can understand that.
It sounds easy, but it's a little harder to get other people to do your bidding than I would like. I welcome someone with a good answer to why no one has picked this up, but I think it's just that no one else put together that this is an inefficiency in the marketplace that is fixable. I don't know; I think that there aren't a lot of people with the particular knowledge background I have that would lead to seeing this inefficiency and then acting on it. I'm also a fair amount better at spotting these market inefficiencies than the average person, which is why I don't have a real job.
I think there's a disconnect here because it's more complicated. You need to understand and believe in several key assumptions for this to seem possible, starting with an explanation of how atypical Craigslist is as a corporation. It really is the only corporation in the world of such influence that is basically run by communists.
Another thing that most people don't understand is that Craigslist does what the users tell them. People see statements from Craig and Jim to that effect, but there's another mental click that needs to take place for someone to understand that they really mean it.
The last time I did this my group only got to 150 people, probably 75 of whom were my friends. It's not too hard to get people to make that first join click but it's a lot harder to get them to go and invite 25 friends to join. So the problem is that people believe in the cause enough to initially join the group, but not enough to invite every one of their Facebook friends.
Maybe they're not trying very hard.
I'm actually seriously disappointed in how hard we're trying. I saw the discussion start in the comments of the "shut up and divide" thread. I came here expecting people to be all over it like ants on a picnic. Instead, there actually appears to be more thought going into spinning theories about why it would be hard than plans for doing it, and none of it really compares to all the serious thinking about TDT, MWI, or "Free Will."
Of course it's hard. The point is not that it's easy, but that it's relatively easy considering how much money is involved.
Here's my own halfharted stab:
This meme needs
GiveWell shows four charities with its top rating:
Village Reach is the winner, as far as the cause moving people. Saving babies in Africa trumps treating TB worldwide and educating mothers or children in the US. (Nurse-Family Partnership sends nurses to teach mothers how to be mothers.)
For the slogan, how about: "Save babies on Craigslist."
EDIT: links, spelling
If this is where the putative money is going, I'm not interested in talking about it here.
Are there any charities out there which could productively use $10M to get us closer to liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, say? The IEC fusion folks could use $10M.
A list of the 100 most interesting projects with organizational frameworks already in existence that could start scaling up with $10M might be worth compiling in and of itself.
You don't care about $1 billion for tuberculosis control? TB may not be an existential risk, but it's still a really big, important problem, and it's one that could easily get a lot worse if universally antibiotic resistant strains start becoming common. If the Dark Lords of the Matrix offered me the choice between "tomorrow someone invents a fusion power plant that actually works, is easily built and maintained, and generates electricity energy at a lower cost than burning fossil fuels does" and "all TB bacteria spontaneously die", it's hard to say which would actually generate more utility.
I would take the TB cure but you are not thinking on the margins. People are already worried about TB, funding is already going there.
The only way this will work is if we trigger feelings that already exist. We cannot create new worries and feelings in the time it takes them to read a Facebook group name. We need something that will already have enough momentum to make them click the button.
I could be misunderstanding your point.
So...the thing that most needs to be done is hard. Gosh, reality isn't allowed to do that to us, is it?
True, but It's still not nearly enough, though. In the short run, the Stop TB Partnership (GiveWell's #2 charity) can productively use about $20 million more to supply drugs to eligible countries.
I would take the fusion plant; an energy technology that is cheaper than fossil fuels in all major ways is basically a license to print money. Most literally it is a license to print money -- you could sell the patent for more than a billion dollars and then cure even more tuberculosis.
Note that I said "someone" - meaning someone other than me - does the inventing. And the alternative is "The TB bacteria immediately becomes extinct - nobody ever gets TB again, and everyone who has it is immediately cured."
Point taken, I misread your scenario.
Probably. But would the general public find IEC (or SIAI) compelling? I'm thinking not.
For a something like this, we need something that will appeal to the average person (at least the average Facebook/Craigslist user), and I think human development projects are more likely to do that than research projects or existential risk projects.
Convincing the general public that these causes are worthwhile sounds like a worthwhile make a desperate effort level project.
Or we can just ignore expected utlity, and attempt to satisfy our desire for warm fuzzies.
Then all versions of this project that I'm interested in won't work. Still seems worth a try.
I guess I'm astounded by the degree to which people seem to value "succeeding at what we set out to do" over "trying to do something important".
Probably. But maybe, also, people have different views (not necessarily correct) of the threshold of importance.
Can the SIAI absorb a billion dollars over five years, if it happened that we could get people behind it?
Nope, not even close, but Michael Vassar might be able to think of something else interesting to do with a billion dollars.
Buy Iceland and build a volcanic lair there.
With a GDP of >15 billion, I think you'll need more than 1 to buy it.
At $200 mil annual there are basically no worthwhile charities that could effectively absorb the entire thing. A good option then is to split the revenue among multiple charities. This probably means a lot to human development (education, health, econ) but some of it could go to someone working on fusion power- the Internet is pretty into alternative energy type stuff. 1 million isn't one billion but it is still worth the effort.
Anyway, I think some of the more likely existential risks are significantly reduced by a better governed Africa and a better governed Africa is a lot easier with a middle class and when 15% of the population isn't HIV+ or dying from tuberculosis.
Care to expand?
Poorly governed states in social and economic turmoil create environments conducive to global terrorism and the black markets that provide weapons capable of serious destruction (which right now means nukes and chemical but in the future could mean nanotech or genetically engineered pathogens). A misgoverned sub-Saharan Africa is also the most like origin point for a naturally occurring pathogen because of the diseases they already have that could mutate to spread faster, the sanitation situation and the fact that few African governments are competent enough to pull off a quarantine.
The absence of rule of law, democratic checks on the military, continual conflict and overall incompetence also increases the chances lab error or misuse of high tech weaponry as technology become more accessible while social, economic and political conditions do not improve.
In general, areas of chaos become more and more dangerous to surrounding regions as technology improves.
I just had a fun idea: take this premise, and the demonstrated difficulty of improving Africa, and the idea that the development vs. likeliness-to-screw-everybody-over-with-WMDs curve would be an inverted U, and calculate the point at which it would be better to cut off all aid & begin bombing Africa into (or within) the Stone Age.
The version of this that I would put forward seriously is that the Westphalian concept of inviolable national sovereignty is a convenience to the rich and complacent inhabitants of successful nations, but a huge detriment to the inhabitants of failed states, condemning them to endless slavery at the hands of incompetent dictators who need fear no invasion as they weaken and starve their captive countries. Africa might benefit enormously from being conquered by almost anyone, including China.
The Global economy would tailspin and the existential risk situation would get a lot worse as a result.
Also, this would probably be a place where I'd depart from utilitarianism, even if it would work.
Clever, if horrific, idea though.
There a high moral cost to beginning bombing Africa. It would create opposition in the Western world that would likely increase the chance of homegrown terrorism.
I think this is voted down unfairly. I read this not as a genuine plea to nuke Africa, but as a Robin Hanson-esque caution against motivated thinking. We'd like aid to Africa to be the Right Thing, and if we're made uncomfortable by the idea that existential risk trumps that, why, here's a good reason why aid to Africa is justified on existential risk grounds! So this is a sort of antidote: if that were your real reason, you'd greet gwern's alternative solution with a great deal more equanimity than you do.
EDIT: I'm obviously super-persuasive, since it's gone from downvoted to upvoted since my comment :-)
Normally I like fun ideas, but a lot of scenarios where Africa is bombed to the Stone Age (to prevent terrorism!!!) involve World War III.
That list is a great idea. But why exactly shouldn't we talk about human development projects?
GiveWell exists because most charity goes horribly awry since it is based on impulsive fuzzy-based giving that pays attention to the 'do something' and 'warm fuzzies' factors, and doesn't focus on maximizing impact. Doing something like this carefully could easily move it orders of magnitude in expected impact, and such care could be prevented with a rush of impulsive moves that poison the waters and favor a relatively inefficient approach even if successful in moving money.
As noted in other posts, I would be concerned about the "feeding stray animals" problem.
I'm not sure why you think that's a bad thing. Effective project management is also about managing risks and downsides, and the most basic risk or downside an initiative can have is whether it's doable at all or worth doing at all. Raw motivation is a necessary but not sufficient condition to success.
Success requires drawing up a plan that covers all links in a fairly long causal chain which starts with people having a discussion here and ends in someone writing a large check to a chosen charity, and you can't handwave away any of the links in that chain no matter how trivial the nature of that link. One of the ways to find out all the links is to indulge in negativity, which people are often good at.
Actually the greatest risk here is that we get tied up in arguing about how to do it and don't actually go and do anything. As far as I'm concerned, that's much more likely than we get this going and all of the money somehow goes to bad charities. There is no way we are going to be able to establish the complete casual chains. At a certain point along the way, we're going to have to just wing it.
Village Reach is a fantastic charity. But they would have no clue what to do with a billion dollars. They could take maybe one percent of the revenue this would generate.
Edit: Which is to say that funding Village Reach is a perfectly reasonable thing to do, we just need a lot more ideas.
Is the idea to save all the ad revenue and then give it as a lump sum? That seems like a strange thing to do. Would Village Reach be able to take the amount each month of ad uptime would generate, once monthly?
GiveWell says they could absorb $2.5 million over the next year. That means if Kevin's math is right 15% of one month's revenue would top them off.
They do separate, regional projects, and that number is what they need to carry out the projects they've already committed to.
If they get on Craigslist and start seeing steady money out of it, they can start a bunch of new projects in new areas.
With what staff? Maybe GiveWell or someone could answer this but right now we have no reason to think they could scale up to a budget 100x what they had last year. We also don't know what level of efficiency they could maintain with the increased size.
With staff they hire. Certain kinds of problems are both inevitable and fixable once money is in the pipeline.
When you add that much money, you're giving it to the planners, not the plan. If what they're doing doesn't scale to the money they get (though I think it will) they'll do something else. Treat it like one of those business plan contests. Their success so far shows that they know how to do charity work.
It will also get people to join on Facebook, without which there will be no money for anyone.
But I'm not married to that particular charity. I just think that with so much money waiting to be claimed, we're having a little too much fun seeing who can predict the smallest nitty-gritties the farthest away.
I'd rather give a lot of the money to GiveWell, earmarked for international charities. They can then decide how much would be effective in the hands of Village Reach.
OK, let's do that. You win.
We can probably still use "Save babies on Craigslist" or something similar as the slogan if we make some baby-oriented charity the "poster child."
EDIT: spelling
I agree that making a lump-sum donation is a bad idea. But 200 million dollars (going by the OP's estimate) per year is still a lot of money for a charity to absorb. Givewell puts the "room for more funding" at $2.5 million (for 2010). This may (probably will) go up for later years, but it's a long way from $200 million. Stop TB Partnership is a bit larger, but still not $200M/year large.
Yeah. It might be cold shower time.
Here is a relevant discussion on CL. Doesn't look good for our heroes.
EDIT: Though this person's proposal didn't involve the option to turn the ads off.
The claim that Craigslist is far from long-run profit maximizing is pretty dubious. It's compatible with the evidence as far as I can see but not very likely. That claim may just be a nice excuse in one interview. Craigslist has for-profit investors, even if they claim to be hands-off.
What investors?
Given how eBay got its own Craigslist clone and is suing them, I'd say CL is far from long-run profit maximizing.
I wasn't familiar with the lawsuit, that's good evidence.
Yeah, eBay is a hostile shareholder. I believe Craig gave an early employee/cofounder 25% of the company in a verbal agreement and that verbal 25% later became worth a lot of money.
Reading that comment left me with an aftertaste of comma.
ETA: Judging by the downvote, this was a bad way of pointing out that the parent comment ended in a comma.