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2016 LessWrong Diaspora Survey Analysis: Part Four (Politics, Calibration & Probability, Futurology, Charity & Effective Altruism)

9 ingres 10 September 2016 03:51AM

Politics

The LessWrong survey has a very involved section dedicated to politics. In previous analysis the benefits of this weren't fully realized. In the 2016 analysis we can look at not just the political affiliation of a respondent, but what beliefs are associated with a certain affiliation. The charts below summarize most of the results.

Political Opinions By Political Affiliation



































Miscellaneous Politics

There were also some other questions in this section which aren't covered by the above charts.

PoliticalInterest

On a scale from 1 (not interested at all) to 5 (extremely interested), how would you describe your level of interest in politics?

1: 67 (2.182%)

2: 257 (8.371%)

3: 461 (15.016%)

4: 595 (19.381%)

5: 312 (10.163%)

Voting

Did you vote in your country's last major national election? (LW Turnout Versus General Election Turnout By Country)
Group Turnout
LessWrong 68.9%
Austrailia 91%
Brazil 78.90%
Britain 66.4%
Canada 68.3%
Finland 70.1%
France 79.48%
Germany 71.5%
India 66.3%
Israel 72%
New Zealand 77.90%
Russia 65.25%
United States 54.9%
Numbers taken from Wikipedia, accurate as of the last general election in each country listed at time of writing.

AmericanParties

If you are an American, what party are you registered with?

Democratic Party: 358 (24.5%)

Republican Party: 72 (4.9%)

Libertarian Party: 26 (1.8%)

Other third party: 16 (1.1%)

Not registered for a party: 451 (30.8%)

(option for non-Americans who want an option): 541 (37.0%)

Calibration And Probability Questions

Calibration Questions

I just couldn't analyze these, sorry guys. I put many hours into trying to get them into a decent format I could even read and that sucked up an incredible amount of time. It's why this part of the survey took so long to get out. Thankfully another LessWrong user, Houshalter, has kindly done their own analysis.

All my calibration questions were meant to satisfy a few essential properties:

  1. They should be 'self contained'. I.E, something you can reasonably answer or at least try to answer with a 5th grade science education and normal life experience.
  2. They should, at least to a certain extent, be Fermi Estimable.
  3. They should progressively scale in difficulty so you can see whether somebody understands basic probability or not. (eg. In an 'or' question do they put a probability of less than 50% of being right?)

At least one person requested a workbook, so I might write more in the future. I'll obviously write more for the survey.

Probability Questions

Question Mean Median Mode Stdev
Please give the obvious answer to this question, so I can automatically throw away all surveys that don't follow the rules: What is the probability of a fair coin coming up heads? 49.821 50.0 50.0 3.033
What is the probability that the Many Worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics is more or less correct? 44.599 50.0 50.0 29.193
What is the probability that non-human, non-Earthly intelligent life exists in the observable universe? 75.727 90.0 99.0 31.893
...in the Milky Way galaxy? 45.966 50.0 10.0 38.395
What is the probability that supernatural events (including God, ghosts, magic, etc) have occurred since the beginning of the universe? 13.575 1.0 1.0 27.576
What is the probability that there is a god, defined as a supernatural intelligent entity who created the universe? 15.474 1.0 1.0 27.891
What is the probability that any of humankind's revealed religions is more or less correct? 10.624 0.5 1.0 26.257
What is the probability that an average person cryonically frozen today will be successfully restored to life at some future time, conditional on no global catastrophe destroying civilization before then? 21.225 10.0 5.0 26.782
What is the probability that at least one person living at this moment will reach an age of one thousand years, conditional on no global catastrophe destroying civilization in that time? 25.263 10.0 1.0 30.510
What is the probability that our universe is a simulation? 25.256 10.0 50.0 28.404
What is the probability that significant global warming is occurring or will soon occur, and is primarily caused by human actions? 83.307 90.0 90.0 23.167
What is the probability that the human race will make it to 2100 without any catastrophe that wipes out more than 90% of humanity? 76.310 80.0 80.0 22.933

 

Probability questions is probably the area of the survey I put the least effort into. My plan for next year is to overhaul these sections entirely and try including some Tetlock-esque forecasting questions, a link to some advice on how to make good predictions, etc.

Futurology

This section got a bit of a facelift this year. Including new cryonics questions, genetic engineering, and technological unemployment in addition to the previous years.

Cryonics

Cryonics

Are you signed up for cryonics?

Yes - signed up or just finishing up paperwork: 48 (2.9%)

No - would like to sign up but unavailable in my area: 104 (6.3%)

No - would like to sign up but haven't gotten around to it: 180 (10.9%)

No - would like to sign up but can't afford it: 229 (13.8%)

No - still considering it: 557 (33.7%)

No - and do not want to sign up for cryonics: 468 (28.3%)

Never thought about it / don't understand: 68 (4.1%)

CryonicsNow

Do you think cryonics, as currently practiced by Alcor/Cryonics Institute will work?

Yes: 106 (6.6%)

Maybe: 1041 (64.4%)

No: 470 (29.1%)

Interestingly enough, of those who think it will work with enough confidence to say 'yes', only 14 are actually signed up for cryonics.

sqlite> select count(*) from data where CryonicsNow="Yes" and Cryonics="Yes - signed up or just finishing up paperwork";

14

sqlite> select count(*) from data where CryonicsNow="Yes" and (Cryonics="Yes - signed up or just finishing up paperwork" OR Cryonics="No - would like to sign up but unavailable in my area" OR "No - would like to sign up but haven't gotten around to it" OR "No - would like to sign up but can't afford it");

34

CryonicsPossibility

Do you think cryonics works in principle?

Yes: 802 (49.3%)

Maybe: 701 (43.1%)

No: 125 (7.7%)

LessWrongers seem to be very bullish on the underlying physics of cryonics even if they're not as enthusiastic about current methods in use.

The Brain Preservation Foundation also did an analysis of cryonics responses to the LessWrong Survey.

Singularity

SingularityYear

By what year do you think the Singularity will occur? Answer such that you think, conditional on the Singularity occurring, there is an even chance of the Singularity falling before or after this year. If you think a singularity is so unlikely you don't even want to condition on it, leave this question blank.

Mean: 8.110300081581755e+16

Median: 2080.0

Mode: 2100.0

Stdev: 2.847858859055733e+18

I didn't bother to filter out the silly answers for this.

Obviously it's a bit hard to see without filtering out the uber-large answers, but the median doesn't seem to have changed much from the 2014 survey.

Genetic Engineering

ModifyOffspring

Would you ever consider having your child genetically modified for any reason?

Yes: 1552 (95.921%)

No: 66 (4.079%)

Well that's fairly overwhelming.

GeneticTreament

Would you be willing to have your child genetically modified to prevent them from getting an inheritable disease?

Yes: 1387 (85.5%)

Depends on the disease: 207 (12.8%)

No: 28 (1.7%)

I find it amusing how the strict "No" group shrinks considerably after this question.

GeneticImprovement

Would you be willing to have your child genetically modified for improvement purposes? (eg. To heighten their intelligence or reduce their risk of schizophrenia.)

Yes : 0 (0.0%)

Maybe a little: 176 (10.9%)

Depends on the strength of the improvements: 262 (16.2%)

No: 84 (5.2%)

Yes I know 'yes' is bugged, I don't know what causes this bug and despite my best efforts I couldn't track it down. There is also an issue here where 'reduce your risk of schizophrenia' is offered as an example which might confuse people, but the actual science of things cuts closer to that than it does to a clean separation between disease risk and 'improvement'.

 

This question is too important to just not have an answer to so I'll do it manually. Unfortunately I can't easily remove the 'excluded' entries so that we're dealing with the exact same distribution but only 13 or so responses are filtered out anyway.

sqlite> select count(*) from data where GeneticImprovement="Yes";

1100

>>> 1100 + 176 + 262 + 84
1622
>>> 1100 / 1622
0.6781750924784217

67.8% are willing to genetically engineer their children for improvements.

GeneticCosmetic

Would you be willing to have your child genetically modified for cosmetic reasons? (eg. To make them taller or have a certain eye color.)

Yes: 500 (31.0%)

Maybe a little: 381 (23.6%)

Depends on the strength of the improvements: 277 (17.2%)

No: 455 (28.2%)

These numbers go about how you would expect, with people being progressively less interested the more 'shallow' a genetic change is seen as.


GeneticOpinionD

What's your overall opinion of other people genetically modifying their children for disease prevention purposes?

Positive: 1177 (71.7%)

Mostly Positive: 311 (19.0%)

No strong opinion: 112 (6.8%)

Mostly Negative: 29 (1.8%)

Negative: 12 (0.7%)

GeneticOpinionI

What's your overall opinion of other people genetically modifying their children for improvement purposes?

Positive: 737 (44.9%)

Mostly Positive: 482 (29.4%)

No strong opinion: 273 (16.6%)

Mostly Negative: 111 (6.8%)

Negative: 38 (2.3%)

GeneticOpinionC

What's your overall opinion of other people genetically modifying their children for cosmetic reasons?

Positive: 291 (17.7%)

Mostly Positive: 290 (17.7%)

No strong opinion: 576 (35.1%)

Mostly Negative: 328 (20.0%)

Negative: 157 (9.6%)

All three of these seem largely consistent with peoples personal preferences about modification. Were I inclined I could do a deeper analysis that actually takes survey respondents row by row and looks at correlation between preference for ones own children and preference for others.

Technological Unemployment

LudditeFallacy

Do you think the Luddite's Fallacy is an actual fallacy?

Yes: 443 (30.936%)

No: 989 (69.064%)

We can use this as an overall measure of worry about technological unemployment, which would seem to be high among the LW demographic.

UnemploymentYear

By what year do you think the majority of people in your country will have trouble finding employment for automation related reasons? If you think this is something that will never happen leave this question blank.

Mean: 2102.9713740458014

Median: 2050.0

Mode: 2050.0

Stdev: 1180.2342850727339

Question is flawed because you can't distinguish answers of "never happen" from people who just didn't see it.

Interesting question that would be fun to take a look at in comparison to the estimates for the singularity.

EndOfWork

Do you think the "end of work" would be a good thing?

Yes: 1238 (81.287%)

No: 285 (18.713%)

Fairly overwhelming consensus, but with a significant minority of people who have a dissenting opinion.

EndOfWorkConcerns

If machines end all or almost all employment, what are your biggest worries? Pick two.

Question Count Percent
People will just idle about in destructive ways 513 16.71%
People need work to be fulfilled and if we eliminate work we'll all feel deep existential angst 543 17.687%
The rich are going to take all the resources for themselves and leave the rest of us to starve or live in poverty 1066 34.723%
The machines won't need us, and we'll starve to death or be otherwise liquidated 416 13.55%
Question is flawed because it demanded the user 'pick two' instead of up to two.

The plurality of worries are about elites who refuse to share their wealth.

Existential Risk

XRiskType

Which disaster do you think is most likely to wipe out greater than 90% of humanity before the year 2100?

Nuclear war: +4.800% 326 (20.6%)

Asteroid strike: -0.200% 64 (4.1%)

Unfriendly AI: +1.000% 271 (17.2%)

Nanotech / grey goo: -2.000% 18 (1.1%)

Pandemic (natural): +0.100% 120 (7.6%)

Pandemic (bioengineered): +1.900% 355 (22.5%)

Environmental collapse (including global warming): +1.500% 252 (16.0%)

Economic / political collapse: -1.400% 136 (8.6%)

Other: 35 (2.217%)

Significantly more people worried about Nuclear War than last year. Effect of new respondents, or geopolitical situation? Who knows.

Charity And Effective Altruism

Charitable Giving

Income

What is your approximate annual income in US dollars (non-Americans: convert at www.xe.com)? Obviously you don't need to answer this question if you don't want to. Please don't include commas or dollar signs.

Sum: 66054140.47384

Mean: 64569.052271593355

Median: 40000.0

Mode: 30000.0

Stdev: 107297.53606321265

IncomeCharityPortion

How much money, in number of dollars, have you donated to charity over the past year? (non-Americans: convert to dollars at http://www.xe.com/ ). Please don't include commas or dollar signs in your answer. For example, 4000

Sum: 2389900.6530000004

Mean: 2914.5129914634144

Median: 353.0

Mode: 100.0

Stdev: 9471.962766896671

XriskCharity

How much money have you donated to charities aiming to reduce existential risk (other than MIRI/CFAR) in the past year?

Sum: 169300.89

Mean: 1991.7751764705883

Median: 200.0

Mode: 100.0

Stdev: 9219.941506342007

CharityDonations

How much have you donated in US dollars to the following charities in the past year? (Non-americans: convert to dollars at http://www.xe.com/) Please don't include commas or dollar signs in your answer. Options starting with "any" aren't the name of a charity but a category of charity.

Question Sum Mean Median Mode Stdev
Against Malaria Foundation 483935.027 1905.256 300.0 None 7216.020
Schistosomiasis Control Initiative 47908.0 840.491 200.0 1000.0 1618.785
Deworm the World Initiative 28820.0 565.098 150.0 500.0 1432.712
GiveDirectly 154410.177 1429.723 450.0 50.0 3472.082
Any kind of animal rights charity 83130.47 1093.821 154.235 500.0 2313.493
Any kind of bug rights charity 1083.0 270.75 157.5 None 353.396
Machine Intelligence Research Institute 141792.5 1417.925 100.0 100.0 5370.485
Any charity combating nuclear existential risk 491.0 81.833 75.0 100.0 68.060
Any charity combating global warming 13012.0 245.509 100.0 10.0 365.542
Center For Applied Rationality 127101.0 3177.525 150.0 100.0 12969.096
Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence Research Foundation 9429.0 554.647 100.0 20.0 1156.431
Wikipedia 12765.5 53.189 20.0 10.0 126.444
Internet Archive 2975.04 80.406 30.0 50.0 173.791
Any campaign for political office 38443.99 366.133 50.0 50.0 1374.305
Other 564890.46 1661.442 200.0 100.0 4670.805
"Bug Rights" charity was supposed to be a troll fakeout but apparently...

This table is interesting given the recent debates about how much money certain causes are 'taking up' in Effective Altruism.

Effective Altruism

Vegetarian

Do you follow any dietary restrictions related to animal products?

Yes, I am vegan: 54 (3.4%)

Yes, I am vegetarian: 158 (10.0%)

Yes, I restrict meat some other way (pescetarian, flexitarian, try to only eat ethically sourced meat): 375 (23.7%)

No: 996 (62.9%)

EAKnowledge

Do you know what Effective Altruism is?

Yes: 1562 (89.3%)

No but I've heard of it: 114 (6.5%)

No: 74 (4.2%)

EAIdentity

Do you self-identify as an Effective Altruist?

Yes: 665 (39.233%)

No: 1030 (60.767%)

The distribution given by the 2014 survey results does not sum to one, so it's difficult to determine if Effective Altruism's membership actually went up or not but if we take the numbers at face value it experienced an 11.13% increase in membership.

EACommunity

Do you participate in the Effective Altruism community?

Yes: 314 (18.427%)

No: 1390 (81.573%)

Same issue as last, taking the numbers at face value community participation went up by 5.727%

EADonations

Has Effective Altruism caused you to make donations you otherwise wouldn't?

Yes: 666 (39.269%)

No: 1030 (60.731%)

Wowza!

Effective Altruist Anxiety

EAAnxiety

Have you ever had any kind of moral anxiety over Effective Altruism?

Yes: 501 (29.6%)

Yes but only because I worry about everything: 184 (10.9%)

No: 1008 (59.5%)


There's an ongoing debate in Effective Altruism about what kind of rhetorical strategy is best for getting people on board and whether Effective Altruism is causing people significant moral anxiety.

It certainly appears to be. But is moral anxiety effective? Let's look:

Sample Size: 244
Average amount of money donated by people anxious about EA who aren't EAs: 257.5409836065574

Sample Size: 679
Average amount of money donated by people who aren't anxious about EA who aren't EAs: 479.7501384388807

Sample Size: 249 Average amount of money donated by EAs anxious about EA: 1841.5292369477913

Sample Size: 314
Average amount of money donated by EAs not anxious about EA: 1837.8248407643312

It seems fairly conclusive that anxiety is not a good way to get people to donate more than they already are, but is it a good way to get people to become Effective Altruists?

Sample Size: 1685
P(Effective Altruist): 0.3940652818991098
P(EA Anxiety): 0.29554896142433235
P(Effective Altruist | EA Anxiety): 0.5

Maybe. There is of course an argument to be made that sufficient good done by causing people anxiety outweighs feeding into peoples scrupulosity, but it can be discussed after I get through explaining it on the phone to wealthy PR-conscious donors and telling the local all-kill shelter where I want my shipment of dead kittens.

EAOpinion

What's your overall opinion of Effective Altruism?

Positive: 809 (47.6%)

Mostly Positive: 535 (31.5%)

No strong opinion: 258 (15.2%)

Mostly Negative: 75 (4.4%)

Negative: 24 (1.4%)

EA appears to be doing a pretty good job of getting people to like them.

Interesting Tables

Charity Donations By Political Affilation
Affiliation Income Charity Contributions % Income Donated To Charity Total Survey Charity % Sample Size
Anarchist 1677900.0 72386.0 4.314% 3.004% 50
Communist 298700.0 19190.0 6.425% 0.796% 13
Conservative 1963000.04 62945.04 3.207% 2.612% 38
Futarchist 1497494.1099999999 166254.0 11.102% 6.899% 31
Left-Libertarian 9681635.613839999 416084.0 4.298% 17.266% 245
Libertarian 11698523.0 214101.0 1.83% 8.885% 190
Moderate 3225475.0 90518.0 2.806% 3.756% 67
Neoreactionary 1383976.0 30890.0 2.232% 1.282% 28
Objectivist 399000.0 1310.0 0.328% 0.054% 10
Other 3150618.0 85272.0 2.707% 3.539% 132
Pragmatist 5087007.609999999 266836.0 5.245% 11.073% 131
Progressive 8455500.440000001 368742.78 4.361% 15.302% 217
Social Democrat 8000266.54 218052.5 2.726% 9.049% 237
Socialist 2621693.66 78484.0 2.994% 3.257% 126


Number Of Effective Altruists In The Diaspora Communities
Community Count % In Community Sample Size
LessWrong 136 38.418% 354
LessWrong Meetups 109 50.463% 216
LessWrong Facebook Group 83 48.256% 172
LessWrong Slack 22 39.286% 56
SlateStarCodex 343 40.98% 837
Rationalist Tumblr 175 49.716% 352
Rationalist Facebook 89 58.94% 151
Rationalist Twitter 24 40.0% 60
Effective Altruism Hub 86 86.869% 99
Good Judgement(TM) Open 23 74.194% 31
PredictionBook 31 51.667% 60
Hacker News 91 35.968% 253
#lesswrong on freenode 19 24.675% 77
#slatestarcodex on freenode 9 24.324% 37
#chapelperilous on freenode 2 18.182% 11
/r/rational 117 42.545% 275
/r/HPMOR 110 47.414% 232
/r/SlateStarCodex 93 37.959% 245
One or more private 'rationalist' groups 91 47.15% 193


Effective Altruist Donations By Political Affiliation
Affiliation EA Income EA Charity Sample Size
Anarchist 761000.0 57500.0 18
Futarchist 559850.0 114830.0 15
Left-Libertarian 5332856.0 361975.0 112
Libertarian 2725390.0 114732.0 53
Moderate 583247.0 56495.0 22
Other 1428978.0 69950.0 49
Pragmatist 1442211.0 43780.0 43
Progressive 4004097.0 304337.78 107
Social Democrat 3423487.45 149199.0 93
Socialist 678360.0 34751.0 41

Now is the time to eliminate mosquitoes

21 James_Miller 06 August 2016 07:10PM

“In 2015, there were roughly 214 million malaria cases and an estimated 438 000 malaria deaths.”  While we don’t know how many humans malaria has killed, an estimate of half of everyone who has ever died isn’t absurd.  Because few people in rich countries get malaria, pharmaceutical companies put relatively few resources into combating it.   

 

The best way to eliminate malaria is probably to use gene drives to completely eradicate the species of mosquitoes that bite humans, but until recently rich countries haven’t been motivated to such xenocide.  The Zika virus, which is in mosquitoes in the United States, provides effective altruists with an opportunity to advocate for exterminating all species of mosquitoes that spread disease to humans because the horrifying and disgusting pictures of babies with Zika might make the American public receptive to our arguments.  A leading short-term goal of effective altruists, I propose, should be advocating for mosquito eradication in the short window before rich people get acclimated to pictures of Zika babies.   

 

Personally, I have (unsuccessfully) pitched articles on mosquito eradication to two magazines and (with a bit more success) emailed someone who knows someone who knows someone in the Trump campaign to attempt to get the candidate to come out in favor of mosquito eradication.  What have you done?   Given the enormous harm mosquitoes inflict on mankind, doing just a little (such as writing a blog post) could have a high expected payoff.

 

Link: Thoughts on the basic income pilot, with hedgehogs

3 Jacobian 04 May 2016 05:47PM

I have resisted the urge of promoting my blog for many months, but this is literally (per my analysis) for the best cause.

We have also raised a decent amount of money so far, so at least some people were convinced by the arguments and didn't stop at the cute hedgehog pictures.

The Brain Preservation Foundation's Small Mammalian Brain Prize won

43 gwern 09 February 2016 09:02PM

The Brain Preservation Foundation’s Small Mammalian Brain Prize has been won with fantastic preservation of a whole rabbit brain using a new fixative+slow-vitrification process.

  • BPF announcement (21CM’s announcement)
  • evaluation
  • The process was published as “Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation”, McIntyre & Fahy 2015 (mirror)

    We describe here a new cryobiological and neurobiological technique, aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation (ASC), which demonstrates the relevance and utility of advanced cryopreservation science for the neurobiological research community. ASC is a new brain-banking technique designed to facilitate neuroanatomic research such as connectomics research, and has the unique ability to combine stable long term ice-free sample storage with excellent anatomical resolution. To demonstrate the feasibility of ASC, we perfuse-fixed rabbit and pig brains with a glutaraldehyde-based fixative, then slowly perfused increasing concentrations of ethylene glycol over several hours in a manner similar to techniques used for whole organ cryopreservation. Once 65% w/v ethylene glycol was reached, we vitrified brains at −135 °C for indefinite long-term storage. Vitrified brains were rewarmed and the cryoprotectant removed either by perfusion or gradual diffusion from brain slices. We evaluated ASC-processed brains by electron microscopy of multiple regions across the whole brain and by Focused Ion Beam Milling and Scanning Electron Microscopy (FIB-SEM) imaging of selected brain volumes. Preservation was uniformly excellent: processes were easily traceable and synapses were crisp in both species. Aldehyde-stabilized cryopreservation has many advantages over other brain-banking techniques: chemicals are delivered via perfusion, which enables easy scaling to brains of any size; vitrification ensures that the ultrastructure of the brain will not degrade even over very long storage times; and the cryoprotectant can be removed, yielding a perfusable aldehyde-preserved brain which is suitable for a wide variety of brain assays…We have shown that both rabbit brains (10 g) and pig brains (80 g) can be preserved equally well. We do not anticipate that there will be significant barriers to preserving even larger brains such as bovine, canine, or primate brains using ASC.

    (They had problems with 2 pigs and got 1 pig brain successfully cryopreserved but it wasn’t part of the entry. I’m not sure why: is that because the Large Mammalian Brain Prize is not yet set up?)
  • previous discussion: Mikula’s plastination came close but ultimately didn’t seem to preserve the whole brain when applied.
  • commentary: Alcor, Robin Hanson, John Smart, Evidence-Based Cryonics, Vice, Pop Sci
  • donation link

To summarize it, you might say that this is a hybrid of current plastination and vitrification methods, where instead of allowing slow plastination (with unknown decay & loss) or forcing fast cooling (with unknown damage and loss), a staged approach is taking: a fixative is injected into the brain first to immediately lock down all proteins and stop all decay/change, and then it is leisurely cooled down to be vitrified.

This is exciting progress because the new method may wind up preserving better than either of the parent methods, but also because it gives much greater visibility into the end-results: the aldehyde-vitrified brains can be easily scanned with electron microscopes and the results seen in high detail, showing fantastic preservation of structure, unlike regular vitrification where the scans leave opaque how good the preservation was. This opacity is one reason that as Mike Darwin has pointed out at length on his blog and jkaufman has also noted that we cannot be confident in how well ALCOR or CI’s vitrification works - because if it didn’t, we have little way of knowing.

EDIT: BPF’s founder Ken Hayworth (Reddit account) has posted a piece, arguing that ALCOR & CI cannot be trusted to do procedures well and that future work should be done via rigorous clinical trials and only then rolled out. “Opinion: The prize win is a vindication of the idea of cryonics, not of unaccountable cryonics service organizations”

…“Should cryonics service organizations immediately start offering this new ASC procedure to their ‘patients’?” My personal answer (speaking for myself, not on behalf of the BPF) has been a steadfast NO. It should be remembered that these same cryonics service organizations have been offering a different procedure for years. A procedure that was not able to demonstrate, to even my minimal expectations, preservation of the brain’s neural circuitry. This result, I must say, surprised and disappointed me personally, leading me to give up my membership in one such organization and to become extremely skeptical of all since. Again, I stress, current cryonics procedures were NOT able to meet our challenge EVEN UNDER IDEAL LABORATORY CONDITIONS despite being offered to paying customers for years[1]. Should we really expect that these same organizations can now be trusted to further develop and properly implement such a new, independently-invented technique for use under non-ideal conditions?

Let’s step back for a moment. A single, independently-researched, scientific publication has come out that demonstrates a method of structural brain preservation (ASC) compatible with long-term cryogenic storage in animal models (rabbit and pig) under ideal laboratory conditions (i.e. a healthy living animal immediately being perfused with fixative). Should this one paper instantly open the floodgates to human application? Under untested real-world conditions where the ‘patient’ is either terminally ill or already declared legally dead? Should it be performed by unlicensed persons, in unaccountable organizations, operating outside of the traditional medical establishment with its checks and balances designed to ensure high standards of quality and ethics? To me, the clear answer is NO. If this was a new drug for cancer therapy, or a new type of heart surgery, many additional steps would be expected before even clinical trials could start. Why should our expectations be any lower for this?

The fact that the ASC procedure has won the brain preservation prize should rightly be seen as a vindication of the central idea of cryonics –the brain’s delicate circuitry underlying memory and personality CAN in fact be preserved indefinitely, potentially serving as a lifesaving bridge to future revival technologies. But, this milestone should certainly not be interpreted as a vindication of the very different cryonics procedures that are practiced on human patients today. And it should not be seen as a mandate for more of the same but with an aldehyde stabilization step casually tacked on. …

[Link] Review of "Doing Good Better"

0 fortyeridania 26 September 2015 07:58AM

The article is here.

The book is by William MacAskill, founder of 80000 Hours and Giving What We Can. Excerpt:

Effective altruism takes up the spirit of Singer’s argument but shields us from the full blast of its conclusion; moral indictment is transformed into an empowering investment opportunity...

Either effective altruism, like utilitarianism, demands that we do the most good possible, or it asks merely that we try to make things better. The first thought is genuinely radical, requiring us to overhaul our daily lives in ways unimaginable to most...The second thought – that we try to make things better – is shared by every plausible moral system and every decent person. If effective altruism is simply in the business of getting us to be more effective when we try to help others, then it’s hard to object to it. But in that case it’s also hard to see what it’s offering in the way of fresh moral insight, still less how it could be the last social movement we’ll ever need.

4 days left in Giving What We Can's 2015 fundraiser - £34k to go

5 RobertWiblin 27 June 2015 02:16AM

We at Giving What We Can have been running a fundraiser to raise £150,000 by the end of June, so that we can make our budget through the end of 2015. We are really keen to keep the team focussed on their job of growing the movement behind effective giving, and ensure they aren't distracted worrying about fundraising and paying the bills.

With 4 days to go, we are now short just £34,000!

We also still have £6,000 worth of matching funds available for those who haven't given more than £1,000 to GWWC before and donate £1,000-£5,000 before next Tuesday! (For those who are asking, 2 of the matchers I think wouldn't have given otherwise and 2 I would guess would have.)

If you've been one of those holding out to see if we would easily reach the goal, now's the time to pitch in to ensure Giving What We Can can continue to achieve its vision of making effective giving the societal default and move millions more to GiveWell-recommended and other high impact organisations.

So please give now or email me for our bank details: robert [dot] wiblin [at] centreforeffectivealtruism [dot] org.

If you want to learn more, please see this more complete explanation for why we might be the highest impact place you can donate. This fundraiser has also been discussed on LessWrong before, as well as the Effective Altruist forum.

Thanks so much!


LW survey: Effective Altruists and donations

18 gwern 14 May 2015 12:44AM

Analysis of 2013-2014 LessWrong survey results on how much more self-identified EAers donate

http://www.gwern.net/EA%20donations

The Atheist's Tithe

7 Alsadius 13 November 2014 05:22PM

I made a comment on another site a week or two ago, and I just realized that the line of thought is one that LW would appreciate, so here's a somewhat expanded version. 

There's a lot of discussion around here about how to best give to charities, and I'm all for this. Ensuring donations are used well is important, and organizations like GiveWell that figure out how to get the most bang for your buck are doing very good work. An old article on LW (that I found while searching to make sure I wasn't being redundant by posting this) makes the claim that the difference between a decent charity and an optimal one can be two orders of magnitude, and I believe that. But the problem with this is, effective altruism only helps if people are actually giving money. 

People today don't tend to give very much to charity. They'll buy a chocolate bar for the school play or throw a few bucks in at work, but less than 2% of national income is donated even in the US, and the US is incredibly charitable by developed-world standards(the corresponding rate in Germany is about 0.1%, for example). And this isn't something that can be solved with math, because the general public doesn't speak math, it needs to be solved with social pressure. 

The social pressure needs to be chosen well. Folks like Jeff Kaufman and Julia Wise giving a massive chunk of their income to charity are of course laudable, but 99%+ of people will regard the thought of doing so with disbelief and a bit of horror - it's simply not going to happen on a large scale, because people put themselves first, and don't think they could possibly part with so much of their income. We need to settle for a goal that is not only attainable by the majority of people, but that the majority of people know in their guts is something they could do if they wanted. Not everyone will follow through, but it should be set at a level that inspires guilt if they don't, not laughter. 

Since we're trying to make it something people can live up to, it has to be proportional giving, not absolute - Bill Gates and Warren Buffett telling each other to donate everything over a billion is wonderful, but doesn't affect many other people. Conversely, telling people that everything over $50k should be donated will get the laugh reaction from ordinary-wealthy folks like doctors and accountants, who are the people we most want to tie into this system. Also, even if it was workable, it creates some terrible disincentives to working extra-hard, which is a bad way to structure a system - we want to maximize donations, not merely ask people to suffer for its own sake. 

Also, the rule needs to be memorable - we can't give out The Income Tax Act 2: Electric Boogaloo as our charitable donation manual, because people won't read it, won't remember it, and certainly won't pressure anyone else into following it. Ideally it should be extremely simple. And it'd be an added bonus if the amount chosen didn't seem arbitrary, if there was already a pre-existing belief that the number is generally appropriate for what part of your income should be given away. 

There's only one system that meets all these criteria - the tithe. Give away 10% of your income to worthy causes(not generally religion, though the religious folk of the world can certainly do so), keep 90% for yourself. It's practical, it's simple, it's guilt-able, it scales to income, it preserves incentives to work hard and thereby increase the total base of donations, and it's got a millennia-long tradition(which means both that it's proven to work and that people will believe it's a reasonable thing to expect).

Encouraging people to give more than that, or to give better than the default, are both worthwhile, but just like saving for retirement, the first thing to do is put enough money in, and only *then* worry about marginal changes in effectiveness. After all, putting Germany on the tithe rule is just as much of an improvement to charitable effectiveness as going from a decent charity to an excellent one, and it scales in a completely different way, so they can be worked on in parallel. 

This is a rule that I try to follow myself, and sometimes encourage others to do while I'm wearing my financial-advisor hat. (And speaking with that hat: If you're a person who will actually follow through on this, avoid chipping in a few dollars here and there when people ask, and save up for bigger donations. That way you get tax receipts, which lower your effective cost of donation, as well as letting you pick better charities). 

A website standard that is affordable to the poorest demographics in developing countries?

10 Ritalin 01 November 2014 01:43PM

Fact: the Internet is excruciatingly slow in many developing countries, especially outside of the big cities.

Fact: today's websites are designed in such a way that they become practically impossible to navigate with connections in the order of, say, 512kps. Ram below 4GB and a 7-year old CPU are also a guarantee of a terrible experience.

Fact: operating systems are usually designed in such an obsolescence-inducing way as well.

Fact: the Internet is a massive source of free-flowing information and a medium of fast, cheap communication and networking.

Conclusion: lots of humans in the developing world are missing out on the benefits of a technology that could be amazingly empowering and enlightening.

I just came across this: what would the internet 2.0 have looked like in the 1980s. This threw me back to my first forays in Linux's command shell and how enamoured I became with its responsiveness and customizability. Back then my laptop had very little autonomy, and very few classrooms had plugs, but by switching to pure command mode I could spend the entire day at school taking notes (in LaTeX) without running out. But I switched back to the GUI environment as soon as I got the chance, because navigating the internet on the likes of Lynx is a pain in the neck.

As it turns out, I'm currently going through a course on energy distribution in isolated rural areas in developing countries. It's quite a fascinating topic, because of the very tight resource margins, the dramatic impact of societal considerations, and the need to tailor the technology to the existing natural renewable resources. And yet, there's actually a profit to be made investing in these projects; if managed properly, it's win-win.

And I was thinking that, after bringing them electricity and drinkable water, it might make sense to apply a similar cost-optimizing, shoestring-budget mentality to the Internet. We already have mobile apps and mobile web standards which are built with the mindset of "let's make this smartphone's battery last as long as possible".

Even then, (well-to-do, smartphone-buying) thrid-worlders are somewhat neglected: Samsung and the like have special chains of cheap Android smartphones for Africa and the Middle East. I used to own one; "this cool app that you want to try out is not available for use on this system" were a misery I had to get used to. 

It doesn't seem to be much of a stretch to do the same thing for outdated desktops. I've been in cybercafés in North Africa that still employ IBM Aptiva machines, mechanical keyboard and all—with a Linux operating system, though. Heck, I've seen town "pubs", way up in the hills, where the NES was still a big deal among the kids, not to mention old arcades—Guile's theme goes everywhere.

The logical thing to do would be to adapt a system that's less CPU intensive, mostly by toning down the graphics. A bare-bones, low-bandwith internet that would let kids worldwide read wikipedia, or classic literature, and even write fiction (by them, for them), that would let nationwide groups tweet to each other in real time, that would let people discuss projects and thoughts, converse and play, and do all of those amazing things you can do on the Internet, on a very, very tight budget, with very, very limited means. Internet is supposed to make knowledge and information free and universal. But there's an entry-level cost that most humans can't afford. I think we need to bridge that. What do you guys think?

 

 

Donation Discussion - alternatives to the Against Malaria Foundation

4 ancientcampus 28 October 2014 03:00AM

About a year and a half ago, I made a donation to the Against Malaria Foundation. This was during jkaufman's generous matching offer.

That was 20 months ago, and my money is still in the "underwriting" phase - funding projects that are still, of yet, just plans and no nets.

Now, the AMF has had a reasonable reason it was taking longer than expected:

"A provisional, large distribution in a province of the [Democratic Republic of the Congo] will not proceed as the distribution agent was unable to agree to the process requested by AMF during the timeframe needed by our co-funding partner."

So they've hit a snag, the earlier project fell through, and they are only now allocating my money to a new project. Don't get me wrong, I am very glad they are telling me where my money is going, and especially glad it didn't just end up in someone's pocket instead. With that said, though, I still must come to this conclusion:

The AMF seems to have more money than they can use, right now.

So, LW, I have the following questions:

  1. Is this a problem? Should one give their funds to another charity for the time being?
  2. Regardless of your answer to the above, are there any recommendations for other transparent, efficient charities? [other than MIRI]

What's the right way to think about how much to give to charity?

10 irrational 24 September 2014 09:42PM

I'd like to hear from people about a process they use to decide how much to give to charity. Personally, I have very high income, and while we donate significant money in absolute terms, in relative terms the amount is <1% of our post-tax income. It seems to me that it's too little, but I have no moral intuition as to what the right amount is.

I have a good intuition on how to allocate the money, so that's not a problem.

Background: I have a wife and two kids, one with significant health issues (i.e. medical bills - possibly for life), most money we spend goes to private school tuition x 2, the above mentioned medical bills, mortgage, and miscellaneous life expenses. And we max out retirement savings.

If you have some sort of quantitative system where you figure out how much to spend on charity, please share. If you just use vague feelings, and you think there can be no reasonable quantitative system, please tell me that as well.

Update: as suggested in the comments, I'll make it more explicit: please also share how you determine how much to give.

Study: In giving charity, let not your right hand...

4 homunq 22 August 2014 10:23PM

So, here's the study¹:

It's veterans' day in Canada. As any good Canadian knows, you're supposed to wear a poppy to show you support the veterans (it has something to do with Flanders Field). As people enter a concourse on the university, a person there does one of three things: gives them a poppy to wear on their clothes; gives them an envelope to carry and tells them (truthfully) that there's a poppy inside; or gives them nothing. Then, after they've crossed the concourse, another person asks them if they want to put donations in a box to support Canadian war veterans.

Who do you think gives the most?

...

If you guessed that it's the people who got the poppy inside the envelope, you're right. 78% of them gave, for an overall average donation of $0.86. That compares to 58% of the people wearing the poppy, for an average donation of $0.34; and 56% of those with no poppy, for an average of $0.15.

Why did the envelope holders give the most? Unlike the no-poppy group, they had been reminded of the expectation of supporting veterans; but unlike the poppy-wearers, they hadn't been given an easy, cost-free means of demonstrating their support.

I think this research has obvious applications, both to fundraising and to self-hacking. It also validates the bible quote (Matthew 6:3) which is the title of this article.

¹ The Nature of Slacktivism: How the Social Observability of an Initial Act of Token Support Affects Subsequent Prosocial Action; K Kristofferson, K White, J Peloza - Journal of Consumer Research, 2014

 

 

 

On not diversifying charity

1 DanielLC 14 March 2014 05:14AM

A common belief within the Effective Altruism movement that you should not diversify charity donations when your donation is small compared to the size of the charity. This is counter-intuitive, and most people disagree with this. A Mathematical Explanation of Why Charity Donations Shouldn't Be Diversified has already been written, but it uses a simplistic model. Perhaps you're uncertain about which charity is best, charities are not continuous, let alone differentiable, and any donation is worthless unless it gives the charity enough money to finally afford another project, your utility function is nonlinear, and to top it all off, rather than accepting the standard idea of expected utility, you are risk-averse.

Standard Explanation:

If you are too lazy to follow the link, or you just want to see me rehash the same argument, here's a summary.

The utility of a donation is differentiable. That is to say, if donating one dollar gives you one utilon, donating another dollar will give you close to one utilon. Not exactly the same, but close. This means that, for small donations, it can be approximated as a linear function. In this case, the best way to donate is to find the charity that has the highest slope, and donate everything you can to it. Since the amount you donate is small compared to the size of the charity, a first-order approximation will be fairly accurate. The amount of good you do with that strategy is close to what you predicted it would do, which is more than you'd predict of any other strategy, which is close to what you'd predict for them, so even if this strategy is sub-optimal, it's at least very close.

Corrections to Account for Reality:

Uncertainty:

Uncertainty is simple enough. Just replace utility with expected utility. Everything will still be continuous, and the reasoning works pretty much the same.

Nonlinear Utility Function:

If your utility function is nonlinear, this is fine as long as it's differentiable. Perhaps saving a million lives isn't a million times better than saving one, but saving the millionth life is about as good as the one after that, right? Maybe each additional person counts for a little less, but it's not like the first million all matter the same, but you don't care about additional people after that.

In this case, the effect of the charity is differentiable with respect to the donation, and the utility is differentiable with respect to the effect of the charity, so the utility is differentiable with respect to the donation.

Risk-Aversion:

If you're risk-averse, it gets a little more complicated.

In this case, you don't use expected utility. You use something else, which I will call meta-utility. Perhaps it's expected utility minus the standard deviation of utility. Perhaps it's expected utility, but largely ignoring extreme tails. What it is is a function from a random variable representing all the possibilities of what could happen to the reals. Strictly speaking, you only need an ordering, but that's not good enough here, since it needs to be differentiable.

Differentiable is more confusing in this case. It depends on the metric you're using. The way we'll be using it here is that having a sufficiently small probability of a given change, or a given probability of a sufficiently small change, counts as a small change. For example, if you only care about the median utility, this isn't differentiable. If I flip a coin, and you win a million dollars if it lands on heads, then you will count that as worth a million dollars if the coin is slightly weighted towards heads, and nothing if it's slightly weighted towards tails, no matter how close it is to being fair. But that's not realistic. You can't track probabilities that precisely. You might care less about the tails, so that only things in the 40% - 60% range matter much, but you're going to pick something continuous. In fact, I think we can safely say that you're going to pick something differentiable. If I add a 0.1% chance of saving a life given some condition, it will make about the same difference as adding another 0.1% chance given the same condition. If you're risk-averse, you'd care more about a 0.1% chance of saving a life it's takes effect during the worst-case scenario than the best-case, but you'd still care about the same for a 0.1% chance of saving a life during the worst case as for upgrading it to saving two lives in that case.

Once you accept that it's continuous, the same reasoning follows as with expected utility. A continuous function of a continuous function is continuous, so the meta-utility of a donation with respect to the amount donated is continuous.

To make the reasoning more clear, here's an example:

Charity A saves one life per grand. Charity B saves 0.9 lives per grand. Charity A has ten million dollars, and Charity B has five million. One or more of these charities may be fraudulent, and not actually doing any good. You have $100, and you can decide where to donate it.

The naive view is to split the $100, since you don't want to risk spending it on something fraudulent. That makes sense if you care about how many lives you save, but not if you care about how many people die. They sound like they're the same thing, but they're not.

If you donate everything to Charity A, it has $10,000,100 and Charity B has $5,000,000. If you donate half and half, Charity A has $10,000,050 and Charity B has $5,000,050. It's a little more diversified. Not much more, but you're only donating $100. Maybe the diversification outweighs the good, maybe not. But if you decide that it is diversifying enough to matter more, why not donate everything to Charity B? That way, Charity A has $10,000,000, and Charity B has $5,000,100. If you were controlling all the money, you'd probably move a million or so from Charity A to Charity B, until it's well and truly diversified. Or maybe it's already pretty close to the ideal and you'd just move a few grand. You'd definitely move more than $100. There's no way it's that close to the optimum. But you only control the $100, so you just do as much as you can with that to make it more diversified, and send it all to Charity B. Maybe it turns out that Charity B is a fraud, but all is not lost, because other people donated ten million dollars to Charity A, and lots of lives were saved, just not by you.

Discontinuity:

The final problem to look at is that the effects of donations aren't continuous. The time I've seen this come up the most is when discussing vegetarianism. If you don't it meat, it's not going to make enough difference to keep the stores from ordering another crate of meat, which means exactly the same number of animals are slaughtered.

Unless, of course, you were the straw that broke the camel's back, and you did keep a store from ordering a crate of meat, and you made a huge difference.

There are times where you might be able to figure that out before-hand. If you're deciding whether or not to vote, and you're not in a battleground state, you know you're not going to cast the deciding vote, because you have a fair idea of who will win and by how much. But you have no idea at what point a store will order another crate of meat, or when a charity will be able send another crate of mosquito nets to Africa, or something like that. If you make a graph of the number of crates a charity sends by percentile, you'll get a step function, where there's a certain chance of sending 500 crates, a certain chance of sending 501, etc. You're just shifting the whole thing to the left by epsilon, so it's a little more likely each shipment will be made. What actually happens isn't continuous with respect to your donation, but you're uncertain, and taking what happens as a random variable, it is continuous.

A few other notes:

Small Charities:

In the case of a sufficiently small charity or large donation, the argument is invalid. It's not that it takes more finesse like those other things I listed. The conclusion is false. If you're paying a good portion of the budget, and the marginal effects change significantly due to your donations, you should probably donate to more than one charity even if you're not risk-averse and your utility function is linear.

I would expect that the next best charity you manage to find would be worse by more than a few percent, so I really doubt it would be worth diversifying unless you personally are responsible for more than a third of the donations.

An example of this is keeping money for yourself. The hundredth dollar you spend on yourself has about a tenth of the effect the thousandth does, and the entire budget is donated by you. The only time you shouldn't diversify is if the marginal benefit of the last dollar is still higher than what you could get donating to charity.

Another example is avoiding animal products. Avoiding steak is much more cost-effective than avoiding milk, but once you've stopped eating meat, you're stuck with things like avoiding milk.

Timeless Decision Theory:

If other people are going to make similar decisions to you, your effective donation is larger, so the caveats about small charities applies. That being said, I don't think this is really much of an issue.

If everyone is choosing independently, even if most of them correlate, the end result will be that the charities get just enough funding that some people donate to some and others donate to others. If this happens, chances are that it would be worth while for a few people to actually split their investments, but it won't make a big difference. They might as well just donate it all to one.

I think this will only become a problem if you're just donating to the top charity on GiveWell, regardless of how closely they rated second place, or you're just donating based purely on theory, and you have no idea if that charity is capable of using more money.

Proportional Giving

10 gjm 02 March 2014 09:09PM

Executive summary: The practice of giving a fixed fraction of one's income to charity is near-universal but possibly indefensible. I describe one approach that certainly doesn't defend it, speculate vaguely about a possible way of fixing it up, and invite better ideas from others.


Many of us give a certain fraction of our income to charitable causes. This sort of practice has a long history:

Deuteronomy 14:22 Thou shalt truly tithe all the increase of thy seed, that the field bringeth forth year by year.

(note that "tithe" here means "give one-tenth of") and is widely practised today:

GWWC Pledge: I recognise that I can use part of my income to do a significant amount of good in the developing world. Since I can live well enough on a smaller income, I pledge that from today until the day I retire, I shall give at least ten percent of what I earn to whichever organizations can most effectively use it to help people in developing countries. I make this pledge freely, openly, and without regret.

And of course it's roughly how typical taxation systems (which are kinda-sorta like charitable donation, if you squint) operate. But does it make sense? Is there some underlying principle from which a policy of giving away a certain fraction of one's income (not necessarily the traditional 10%, of course) follows?

The most obvious candidate for such a principle would be what we might call

Weighted Utilitarianism: Act so as to maximize a weighted sum of utility, where (e.g.) one's own utility may be weighted much higher than that of random far-away people.

But this can't produce anything remotely like a policy of proportional giving. Assuming you aren't giving away many millions per year (which is a fair assumption if you're thinking in terms of a fraction of your salary) then the level of utility-per-unit-money achievable by your giving is basically independent of what you give, and so is the weight you attach to the utility of the beneficiaries.

So suppose that when your income, after taking out donations, is $X, your utility (all else equal) is u(X), so that your utility per marginal dollar is u'(X); and suppose you attach weight 1 to your own utility and weight w to that of the people who'd benefit from your donations; and suppose their gain in utility per marginal dollar given is t. Then when your income is S you will set your giving g so that u'(S-g) = wt.

What this says is that a weighted-utilitarian should keep a fixed absolute amount S-g of his or her income, and give all the rest away. The fixed absolute amount will depend on the weight w (hence, on exactly which people are benefited by the donations) and on the utility per dollar given t (hence, on exactly what charities are serving them and how severe their need is), but not on the person's pre-donation income S.

(Here's a quick oversimplified example. Suppose that utility is proportional to log(income), that the people your donations will help have an income equivalent to $1k/year, that you care 100x more about your utility than about theirs, and that your donations are the equivalent of direct cash transfers to those people. Then u' = 1/income, so you should keep everything up to $100k/year and give the rest away. The generalization to other weighting factors and beneficiary incomes should be obvious.)

This argument seems reasonably watertight given its premises, but proportional giving is so well-established a phenomenon that we might reasonably trust our predisposition in its favour more than our arguments against. Can we salvage it somehow?

Here's one possibility. One effect of income is (supposedly) to incentivize work, and maybe (mumble near mode mumble) this effect is governed entirely by anticipated personal utility and not by any benefit conferred on others. Then the policy derived above, which above the threshold makes personal utility independent of effort, would lead to minimum effort and hence maybe less net weighted utility than could be attained with a different policy. Does this lead to anything like proportional giving, at least for some semi-plausible assumptions about the relationship between effort and income?

At the moment, I don't know. I have a page full of scribbled attempts to derive something of the kind, but they didn't work out. And of course there might be some better way to get proportional giving out of plausible ethical principles. Anyone want to do better?

Proxy Donating as Spam Filter

4 beth 19 September 2013 01:55AM

One thing that sometimes makes me hesitate to donate to a cause is that, unless you're donating in person and using cash, you're inevitably signing up for a gigantic stream of junk mail, not just from the organization you gave money to, but other, often totally unrelated charities as well. I haven't noticed a lot of these charities offering a privacy policy that lets you avoid this, but I haven't paid close attention because frankly, I don't think I'd have a lot of confidence in such a privacy policy even if I saw one in some literature.

I wonder if there are donations to be gained in guaranteeing this sort of privacy by going through a third party. Charities could include the usual pre-addressed envelope in their mailings, only instead of their own address it would go to an organization called Givepal. The envelope would include the charity's id, and donors would be instructed to make their checks out to Givepal, who would then distribute the money to the specified charity, keeping the transaction anonymous. Givepal could survive by taking a cut of the donations if necessary, or could itself operate as a non-profit.

How Efficient is the Charitable Market?

16 lukeprog 24 August 2013 05:57AM

When I talk about the poor distribution of funds in charity, people in the effective altruism movement sometimes say, "Didn't Holden Karnofsky show that charity is an efficient market in his post Broad Market Efficiency?"

My reply is "No. Holden never said, and doesn't believe, that charity is an efficient market."

 

What is an efficient market?

An efficient market is one in which "one cannot consistently achieve returns in excess of average market returns... given the information available at the time the investment is made." (Details here.)

Of course, market efficiency is a spectrum, not a yes/no question. As Holden writes, "The most efficient markets can be consistently beaten only by the most talented/dedicated players, while the least efficient [markets] can be beaten with fairly little in the way of talent and dedication."

Moreover, market efficiency is multi-dimensional. Any particular market may be efficient in some ways, and in some domains, while highly inefficient in other ways and other domains.

continue reading »

Q for GiveWell: What is GiveDirectly's mechanism of action?

16 Eliezer_Yudkowsky 31 July 2013 08:02PM

I first wrote up the following post, then happened to run into Holden Karnofsky in person and asked him a much-shortened form of the question verbally.  My attempt to recount Holden's verbal reply is also given further below.  I was moderately impressed by Holden's response because I had not thought of it when listing out possible replies, but I don't understand yet why Holden's response should be true.  Since GiveWell has recently posted about objections to GiveDirectly and replies, I decided to go ahead and post this now.


A question for GiveWell:

Your current #2 top-rated charity is GiveDirectly, which gives one-time gifts of $1000 over 9 months, directly to poor recipients in Kenya via M-PESA.

Givewell tries for high standards of evidence of efficacy and cost-effectiveness.  As I understand it, you don't just want the charity to be arguably cost effective, you want a very high probability that the charity is cost-effective.

The main evidence I've seen cited for direct giving is that the recipients who received the $1000 are then substantially better off 9 months later compared to people who aren't.

While I can imagine arguments that could repair the obvious objection to this reasoning, I haven't seen yet how the resulting evidence about cost-effectiveness could rise again to the epistemic standards one would expect of Givewell's #2 evidence-based charity.

The obvious objection is as follows:  Suppose the Kenyan government simply printed new shillings and handed out $1000 of such shillings to the same recipients targeted by GiveDirectly.  Although the recipients would be better off than non-recipients, this might not reflect any improvement in net utility in Kenya because no new resources were created by printing the money.

There are of course obvious replies to this obvious objection:

(1)  Because the shillings handed out by GiveDirectly are purchased on the foreign currency exchange market using U. S. dollars, and would otherwise have been spent in Kenya in other ways, we should not expect any inflation of the shilling, and should expect an increase in Kenyan consumption of foreign goods corresponding to the increased price of shillings implied by GiveDirectly adding their marginal demand to the auction and thereby raising the marginal price of all shillings sold.  The primary mechanism of action by which GiveDirectly benefits Kenya is by raising the price of shillings in the foreign exchange market and making more hard currency available to sellers of shillings.  So far as I can tell, this argument ought to generalize:  Any argument that the Kenyan government could not accomplish most of the same good by printing shillings will mean that the primary mechanism of GiveWell's effectiveness must be the U.S. dollars being exchanged for the shillings on the foreign currency market.  This in turn means that GiveDirectly could accomplish most of its good by buying the same shillings on the foreign currency market and burning them.

(Or to sharpen the total point of this article:  The sum of the good accomplished by GiveDirectly should equal:

  • The good accomplished by the Kenyan government printing shillings and distributing them to the same recipients;
  • plus the good accomplished by GiveDirectly then purchasing shillings on the foreign exchange market using US dollars, and burning them.

Indeed, since these mechanisms of action seem mostly independent, we ought to be able to state a percentage of good accomplished which is allegedly attributed to each, summing to 1.  E.g. maybe 80% of the good would be achieved by printing shillings and distributing them to the same recipients, and 20% would be achieved by purchasing shillings on the foreign exchange market and burning them.  But then we have mostly the same questions as before about how to generate wealth by printing shillings.)

(2)  Inequality in Kenya is such that redistributing the supply of shillings toward the very poor increases utility in Kenya. Thus the Kenyan government could accomplish as much good as GiveDirectly by printing an equivalent number of shillings and giving them to the same recipients.  This would create inflation that is a loss to other Kenyans, some of them also very poor, but so much of the shilling supply is held by the rich that the net results are favorable.  Printing shillings can create happiness because it shifts resources from making speedboats for the rich to making corrugated iron roofs for the poor.

(It would be nice if the Kenyan government just printed shillings for GiveDirectly to use, but this the Kenyan government will not realistically do.  Effective altruists must live in the real world, and in the real world GiveDirectly will only accomplish its goals with the aid of effective altruists.  One cannot live in the should-universe where Kenya's government is taking up the burden.  Effective altruists should reason as if the Kenya government consists of plastic dolls who cannot be the locus of responsibility instead of them - that's heroic epistemology 101.  Maybe there will eventually be returns on lobbying for Minimum Guaranteed Income in Kenya if the programs work, but that's for tomorrow, not right now.)

(3)  Like the European Union, Kenya is not printing enough shillings under standard economic theory.  (I have no idea if this is plausibly true for Kenya in particular.)  If the government printed shillings and gave them to the same recipients, this would create real wealth in Kenya because the economy was operating below capacity and velocity of trade would pick up.  The shillings purchased by GiveDirectly would otherwise have stayed in bank accounts rather than going to other Kenyans.  Note that this contradicts the argument step in (1) where we said that the purchased shillings would otherwise have been spent elsewhere, so you should have questioned one argument step or the other.

(4)  Village moneylenders and bosses can successfully extract most surplus generated within their villages by raising rents or demanding bribes.  The only way that individuals can escape the grasp of moneylenders and rentiers is with a one-time gift that was not expected and which the moneylenders and bosses could not arrange to capture.  The government could accomplish as much good as GiveDirectly by printing the same number of shillings and giving them to the same people in an unpredictable pattern.  This would create some inflation but village moneylenders or bosses would ease off on people from whom they couldn't extract as much value, whereas the one-time gift recipients can purchase capital goods that will make them permanently better off in ways that don't allow the new value to be extracted by moneylenders or bosses.

If I recall correctly, GiveDirectly uses the example of a family using some of the gift money to purchase a corrugated iron roof.  From my perspective the obvious objection is that they could just be purchasing a corrugated iron roof that would've gone to someone else and raising the prices of roofs.  (1) says that Kenya has more foreign exchange on hands and can import, not one more corrugated iron roof, but a variety of other foreign goods; (2) says that the resources used in the corrugated iron roof would otherwise have been used to make a speedboat; (3) says that a new trade takes place in which somebody makes a corrugated iron roof that wouldn't have been manufactured otherwise; and (4) says that the village moneylenders usually adjust their interest rates so as to prevent anyone from saving up enough money to buy a corrugated iron roof.

The trouble is that all of these mechanisms of action seem much harder to measure and be sure of, than the measurable outcomes for gift recipients vs. non-recipients.

To reiterate, the sum of the good accomplished by GiveDirectly should equal the good accomplished by the Kenyan government printing shillings and distributing them to the same recipients, plus the good accomplished by GiveDirectly purchasing shillings on the foreign exchange market using US dollars and then burning them.  It seems to me to be difficult to arrive at a state of strong evidence about either of the two terms in this sum, with respect to any mechanism of action I've thought of so far.

With respect to the second term in this sum:  GiveDirectly buying shillings on the foreign exchange market and burning them might create wealth, but it's hard to see how you would measure this over the relevant amounts, and no such evidence was cited in the recommendation of GiveDirectly as the #2 charity.

With respect to the first term in this sum:  Under the Bayesian definition of evidence, strong evidence is evidence we are unlikely to see when the theory is false.  Even in the absence of any mechanism whereby printing nominal shillings creates happiness or wealth, we would still expect to find that the wealth and happiness of gift recipients exceeded the wealth of non-recipients.  So measuring that the gift recipients are wealthier and happier is not strong or even medium evidence that printing nominal shillings creates wealth, unless I'm missing something here.  Our posterior that printing shillings and giving them to certain people would create net wealth in any given quantity, should roughly equal our prior, after updating on the stated experimental evidence.


When I posed a shortened form of this question to Holden Karnofsky, he replied (roughly, I am trying to rephrase from memory):

It seems to me that this is a perverse decomposition of the benefit accomplished.  There's no inflation in the shilling because you're buying them, and since this is true, decomposing the benefit into an operation that does inflationary damage as a side effect, and then another operation that makes up for the inflation, is perverse.  It's like criticizing the Against Malaria Foundation based on a hypothetical which involves the mosquito nets being made from the flesh of babies and then adding another effect which saves the lives of other babies.  Since this is a perverse sum involving a strange extra side effect, it's okay that we can't get good estimates involving either of the terms in it.

Please keep in mind that this is Holden's off-the-cuff, non-written in-person response as rephrased by Eliezer Yudkowsky from imperfect memory.

With that said, I've thought about (what I think was) Holden's answer and I feel like I'm still missing something.  I agree that if U.S. dollars were being sent directly to Kenyan recipients and used only to purchase foreign goods, so that foreign goods were being directly sent from the U.S. to Kenyan recipients, then improvement in measured outcome for recipients compared to non-recipients would be an appropriate metric, and that the decomposition would be perverse.  But if the received money, in the form of Kenyan shillings, is being used primarily to purchase Kenyan goods, and causing those goods to be shipped to one villager rather than another while also possibly increasing velocity of trade, remedying inequality, and enabling completely different actors to buy some amount of foreign goods, then I honestly don't understand why this scenario should have the same causal mechanisms as the scenario where foreign goods are being shipped in from outside the country.  And then I honestly don't understand why measured improvements for one Kenyan over another should be a good proxy for aggregate welfare change to the country.

I may be missing something that an economist would find obvious or I may have misunderstood Holden's reply.  But to me, my sum seems like an obvious causal decomposition of the effects in Kenya, neither of whose terms can be estimated well.  I don't understand why I should expect the uncertainty in these two estimates to cancel out when they are added; I don't understand what background causal model yields this conclusion.


To be clear, I personally would guess that the U.S. would be net better off, if the Federal Reserve directly sent everyone in the U.S. with income under $20K/year a one-time $6,000 check with the money phasing out at a 10% rate up to $80K/year.  This is because, in order of importance:

  • I buy the analogous market monetarist argument (3) that the U.S. is printing too little money.
  • I buy the analogous argument (2) about inequality.
  • (However, I also somewhat suspect that some analogous form of (4) is going on with poor people somehow systematically having all but a certain amount of value extracted from them, which is in general how a modern country can have only 2% instead of 95% of the population being farmers, and yet there are still people living hand-to-mouth.  I would worry that a predictable, universal one-time gift of $6K would not defeat this phenomenon, and that the gift money will just be extracted again somehow.  In the case of Minimum Guaranteed Income, I would worry that the labor share of income will drop proportionally to small amounts of MGI as wages are just bid down by people who can live on less.  Or something.  This would be a much longer discussion and the ideas are much less simple than the above two notions, probably also less important.  I'm just mentioning it again because of my long-term puzzlement with the question "Why are there still poor people after agricultural productivity rose by a factor of 100?")

What I wouldn't say is that my belief in the above is as strong as my belief in, say, the intelligence explosion.  I'd guess that the printing operation would do more good than harm, but it's not what I would call a strong evidence-based conclusion.  If we're going to be okay with that standard of argument generally, then the top charity under that standard of reasoning, generally and evenhandedly applied, ought to work out to some charity that does science and technology research.  (X-risk minimization might seem substantially 'weirder' than that, but the best science-funding charities should be only equally weird.)  And I wouldn't measure the excess of happiness of gift-recipients compared to non-recipients in a pilot program, and call this a good estimate of the net good if a Minimum Guaranteed Income were universally adopted.

So to reiterate, my question to Givewell is not "Why do you think GiveDirectly might maybe end up doing some good anyway?" but "Does GiveDirectly rise to the standards required for your #2 evidence-based charity?"

Use Search Engines Early and Often

0 katydee 05 May 2013 08:33AM

The Internet contains vast amounts of useful content. Unfortunately, it also contains vast amounts of garbage, superstimulus hazards, and false, meaningless, or outright harmful information. One skill that is hence quite useful in the modern day is using search engines correctly, allowing you to separate the wheat from the chaff. When doing so, one can often uncover preexisting work that solves your problem for you, the answers to relevant factual questions, and so on. It is rare to find a situation where search engines are outright useless-- at the very least they tend to point you in the direction of useful information.

Further, the time cost of setting up and refining a search is extremely low, meaning that most of the time "just Google it" should in fact be your default response to a situation where you don't have very much information.[1] Overall, I consider one's ability to use search engines-- and, just as importantly, one's ability to recognize what types of situations can benefit from using them-- a basic but fairly significant instrumental rationality skill.

Much of the above sounds extremely obvious, and in point of fact it should be-- but the fact remains that people don't use search engines anywhere near as often as they seemingly should. I've frequently found myself in situations where someone in the same room as me asks me a trivially searchable factual question while we are both using computers. Worse still, I've been in situations where people do the same over IRC! The existence of lmgtfy indicates that others have noticed this issue before, and yet it remains a problem.

So, how can we do better?

One easy trick that I've found very helpful is to use Goodsearch instead of Google. Goodsearch is a service that automatically donates a cent to a charity of your choice whenever you search.[2] Further, it can be installed into your search toolbar in Firefox, making the activation cost of using Goodsearch rather than Google essentially zero if, like me, you tend to search in the search bar instead of the URL field. Goodsearch has had profound effects on my tendency to perform searches because it gives me a little hit of "doing good" every time I perform a search, thus encouraging me to do so in more situations, thus causing me to accrue more money via Goodsearch, etc.

This has not only made me more productive by causing me to search more but added positive externalities to every search I conduct. Earlier, I would say that I frequently used search engines to find out information about a new topic or project-- now I would say that I nearly automatically do this as the first step in most situations where I need some information before proceeding. The potential information gained from a search is very high, the costs of performing a search are very low, and with Goodsearch you can donate a little bit to charity while you do so.

If you're reading this in Firefox and haven't already spent large amounts of time getting used to advanced search methods in other engines (and maybe even if you have), I strongly suggest navigating over to Goodsearch, signing up for an account, and installing the Goodsearch App to make it your default toolbar search. For me, this proved to be a big win-- opportunities to increase instrumental rationality for only a minimal time expenditure while also earning free money for charity are not exactly common!

 

[1] Note that there are some things you might not want to Google. I would, for instance, be very careful about what terms I used if I were looking into the history of political assassinations.

[2] Before anyone gets too clever, there are restrictions.

[Link] Caplan asks for help optimizing his will.

4 Jayson_Virissimo 30 April 2013 02:12AM

Bryan Caplan of Econlog asks his readers how to improve his will (given a few constraints) in light of the principles of optimal philanthropy. His current draft reads:

I give and bequeath to whatever charity is currently ranked #1 by GiveWell, the sum of $100,000 adjusted for inflation since 2013 using the U.S. Consumer Price Index, or 10% of the total value of my estate excluding our primary residence, whichever is smaller.  If GiveWell no longer exists, I give and bequeath the same sum to another charity, selected by my wife and children, dedicated to helping the deserving poor in the Third World in a maximally cost-effective manner.  I request that my wife and children consult my friends Robin Hanson, Alexander Tabarrok, Fabio Rojas, James Schneider, Michael Huemer, William Dickens, and Jason Brennan to help them select the most cost-effective charity with this mission.  If possible, funding for this bequest should come from my tax-deferred 403(b) retirement accounts.

The full blog post can be found here.

Robin Hanson responds:

I fear "the Third World" might not be a robust reference, and that GiveWell will no longer exist. You might pick some "ex ante % chance that I'd have died by now", such as 25%, and give the money away when you are at an age where you've suffered that % chance. This could ensure at 75% chance that you'll give the money away yourself.

SENS and Givewell: Conversation between Holden Karnofsky and Aubrey de Grey

18 curiousepic 05 March 2013 07:24PM

Givewell’s Holden Karnofsky, who has previously posted his thoughts on Givewell supporting SI/MIRI recently discussed the potential for Givewell to begin evaluating biomedical charities, in Givewell’s Yahoo Group.  Someone suggested (as I have through less direct means) that they take a hard look at SENS Research Foundation, and then Aubrey de Grey appeared and began an interesting discussion with Holden.

The thread begins with Holden’s long initial post about Givewell’s stance on investigating and recommending biomedical charities, which is definitely worth the read for greater insight. The rest of the conversation is aggregated below for anyone else who can’t stomach Yahoo Groups’ interface.

Overall, Holden seems to agree with the goal of SENS, and interested in the details, but the conversation seems to have ended in October 2012 with Holden stating that he was waiting for Dario Amodei’s thoughts on SENS.


Holden,

First, I think that this is an excellent document. I checked for a
number of things that I had heard about (Breakout Labs, John
Ioannidis, Cochrane Collaboration) and they're all there in your
document.

The one thing that's not explicitly mentioned: longevity and life
extension research. At least prima facie, this seems like something
that should be more important than individual disease research, and it
seems like a classic "Valley of Death" case (pun unintended, but
noted) -- T1 stage to use your terminology. I think the SENS website
http://www.sens.org would be a good starting point for one of the (to
me promising) approaches to life extension. I recall from past
conversations that you were aware of SENS, so this is not new to you,
but I think that longevity should be included as part of any
discussion of biomedical research and given separate consideration
given that it has a much lower status than research into specific
conditions such as cancer, dementia, etc. You may ultimately conclude
that not enough can be done in this area, but I think it should be
part of your preliminary stuff. [btw, the United States has a National
Institute of Aging, but it's much lower-status than most of the other
grantmakers mentioned here].

Vipul



Hi Vipul,

Thanks for the thoughts. I had a followup conversation with Dario about this topic a few days ago. I think the question of "could one fund translational research to treat/prevent aging?" provides an interesting illustration of some of the tricky dynamics here for a funder:
  • It's possible that if there were a great deal more attention giving to treating/preventing aging, we would have some promising treatments. So in a broad sense it's possible that aging is underinvested in.
  • A lot of the best basic biology research isn't clearly pointing toward one treatment/condition or another; it's about understanding the fundamentals of how organisms operate. So having an interest in treating aging, as opposed to cancer, might not have a major impact on which projects one funds, if one's main goal is to fund outstanding basic biology research.
  • Perhaps because of the lack of emphasis on treating aging (or perhaps because it's simply too difficult of a problem), there don't seem to be promising findings in the "Valley of Death" relevant to aging; the few promising leads have been explored.
  • So even if, in a broad sense, there is too little attention given to this problem, knowing this doesn't necessarily yield a clear direction for a relatively small-scale funder of biomedical research.
Best,
Holden



Hi everyone,

My attention was brought to this thread, by virtue of the fact that it was my work that gave rise to SENS Foundation, and I'm looking forward to getting more involved here; I've held the Effective Altruism movement in high regard for some time. However, given my newbie status here I want to start by apologising in advance for any oversight of previously-discussed issues etc. I'm naturally delighted both at Holden's post and at Vipul's reply (which I should stress that I did not plant! - I do not know Vipul at all, though I look forward to changing that). I would like to mention just a few key points for discussion:

- Holden, I want to compliment you on your appreciation of how academia really works. Everything you say about that is spot on. The aversion to "high risk high gain" work that has arisen and become so endemic in the system is the most important point here, in terms of why parallel funding routes are needed.

- I'm slightly confused that a lot of Holden's remarks are focused on the private sector (i.e. startups), since my understanding was that GiveWell is about philanthropy; but I realise that there is not all that clear a boundary between the two (and I note the mention of Breakout Labs, with which I have close links and which sits astride that divide more than arguably anyone). The "valley of death" in pre-competitive translational research is a rather different one than that encountered by startups, but the principle is the same, and research to postpone aging certainly encounteres it.

- Something that I presume factors highly among GiveWell's criteria is the extent to which a cause may be undervalued by the bulk of major philanthropists, such that an infusion of additional funds would make more of a difference than in an area that is already being well funded. To me this seems to mirror the logic of focusing on the shortcomings (gaps) in NIH's funding (and that of traditional-model foundations). Holden notes that "Anyone we consider for funding ought to be able to explain why they're better at allocating the funds than the NIH" and I agree wholeheartedly, but my inference is that he thinks that some orgs may indeed be able to explain that. I certainly think that SENS Foundation can.

- Coming to aging: research to postpone aging has the unique problem of quite indescribeable irrationality on the part of most of the general public, policy-makers and even biologists with regard to its desirability. Biogerontologists have been talking to brick walls for decades in their effort to get the rest of the world to appreciate that aging is what causes age-related ill-health, and thus that treatments for aging are merely preventative geriatrics. The concept persists, despite biogerontologists' best efforts, that aging is "natural" and should be left alone, whereas the diseases that it brings about are awful and should be fought. This is made even more bizarre by the fact that the status of age-related diseases as aspects of the later stages of aging absolutely, unequivocally implies that efforts to attack those diseases directly are doomed to fail. As such, this is a (unique? certainly very rare) case where a philanthropic contribution can make a particularly big difference simply because most philanthropists don't see the case for it. It underpins why having an interest in treating aging, as opposed to cancer, absolutely has a major impact on which projects one funds. It's also a case for (if I understand the term correctly) meta-research.

- A lot of the chatter about treating aging revolves around longevity, but it shouldn't. I'm all in favour of longevity, don't get me wrong, but it's not what gets me up in the morning: what does is health. I want people to be truly youthful, however long ago they were born: simple as that. The benefits of longevity per se to humanity may also be substantial, in the form of greater wisdom etc, but that would necessarily come about only very gradually (we won't have any 1000-year-old for at least 900 years whatever happens!), so it doesn't figure strongly in my calculations.

- When forced to acknowledge that the idea of aging being a high-priority target for medicine is an inescapeable consequence of things they already believe (notably that health is good and ageism is bad), many people retreat to the standpoint that it's never going to be possible so it's OK to be irrational about whether it's desirable. The feasibility of postponing age-related ill-health by X years with medicine available Y years from now is, of course, a matter of speculation on which experts disagree, just as with any other pioneering technology. I know that Holden and others have expressed caution (at best) concerning the accuracy of any kind of calculation of probabilities of particular outcomes in the distant (or even not-so-distant) future, and I share that view. However, an approach that may appeal more is to estimate how much humanitarian benefit a given amount of progress would deliver, and then to ask how unlikely that scenario needs to be to make it not worth pursuing. My claim is that the benefits of hastening the defeat of aging by even a few years (which is the minimum that I claim SENS Foundation is in a position to do, given adequate funding) would be so astronomical that the required chance of success to make such an effort worthwhile would be tiny - too tiny for it to be reasonable to argue that such funding would be inadvisable. But of course that is precisely what I would want GiveWell to opine on.

- In the event that GiveWell (or anyone else) were to decide and declare that the defeat of aging is indeed a cause that philanthropists should support, there then arises the question of which organisation(s) should be supported in the best interests of that mission. We at SENS Foundation have worked diligently to rise as quickly as possible in the legitimacy stakes by all standard measures, but we are still young and there remains more to do. If I were to offer an argument to fund us rather than any other entity, it would largely come down to the fact that no other organisation has even a serious plan for defeating aging, let alone a track record of implementing such a plan's early stages.

- A significant chunk of what we do is of a kind that I think comes under "meta-research". A prominent example is a project we're funding at Denver University to extend the well-respected forecasting system "International Futures" so that it can analyse scenarios incorporating dramatically postponed aging.

I greatly welcome any feedback.

Cheers, Aubrey




Hi Aubrey,

Thanks for the thoughts.

The NIH appears to have a division focused on research relevant to this topic: http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/dab . Its budget appears to be ~$175 million (per year). The National Institute on Aging, which houses this division, has a budget of about $1 billion per year, including a separate ~$400 million for neuroscience (which may also be relevant) as well as $115 million for intramural research. Figures are from http://www.nia.nih.gov/about/budget/2012/fiscal-year-2013-budget. The Institute states that its mandate includes translational research (http://www.nia.nih.gov/research/faq/does-nia-support-translational-research). How would you distinguish your work from this work?

(For the moment I'm putting aside the question I raised in my previous response to Vipul on this topic, regarding whether it's best to approach biology funding from the perspective of "trying to treat/cure a particular condition" or "trying to understand  fundamental questions in biology whose applications are difficult to predict.")

Best,
Holden



Hi Holden - many thanks.

First: yes, there are really three somewhat separate questions for someone trying to evaluate whether to support SENS Foundation:

1) Is the medical control of aging a hugely valuable mission?

2) Assuming "yes" to (1), is it best achieved by basic research or translational research?

3) Assuming translational, is SENS Foundation the organisation that uses money most effectively in pursuit of that mission?

I had rather expected that you would take some convincing on item (1), and much of what I wrote last time was focused on that. Since it isn't the focus of your question to me, I'm now going to assume until further notice that there is no dissent on that.

So, to answer your question: actually you're not putting aside the basic-vs-translational question as much as you may think you are. The word "translational" is flavour of the month in government funding circles these days (not only in the USA), so it's not surprising that the NIA has a public statement of the kind you pointed to. However, notice that the link they give "for more information" is to a page listing ALL "Funding Opportunity Announcements". There is no page specifically for translational ones, and the reason there isn't is that the amount of work that the NIA actually funds that could really be called translational is tiny. In other words, the page you found is actually just blatant spin. The neuroscience slice you mention is an anomaly arising from the way NIA was founded (the natural place for that money is clearly NINDS): the fact that it's NIA money does not, in practice, translate into its being spent on work to prevent neurodegeneration by treating its cause (aging). Instead, just like NINDS money, it's spent on attacking neurodegeneration directly, as if such diseases could be eliminated from the body just like an infection: the same old mistake that afflicts, and dooms, the whole of geriatric medicine.

So, the first answer to your question is that SENS Foundation really DOES focus on translational research, with an explicit goal of postponing age-related ill-health. But there's also another big difference: we can attack this problem relatively free of the other priorities that afflict mainstream funding (whether from NIH or from trasitional foundations). Most importantly, though we do and will continue to publish our interim results in the peer-reviewed literature, we are much less constrained by "publish or perish" tyranny than typical academics are. This allows us to proceed by constructing and implementing a rational "project plan" (namely SENS) to get to the intended goal (the defeat of aging), whereas what little translational work is funded by NIA or others is guided overwhelmingly by the imperative to get some kind of positive result as quickly as possible, even when it's understood that those results are not remotely likely to "scale", i.e. to translate into eventual medical treatments that significantly delay aging. A great example of this is the NIA's Interventions Testing Program (ITP) to test the mouse longevity effects of various small molecules. The ITP only exists at all (and in a far smaller form than originally intended) as a result of several years of persistence by the then head of the NIA's biology division (Huber Warner), and it focuses entirely on delivery of simple drugs starting rather early in life, with the result that no information emerges that's relevant to treating people who are already in middle age or older. (This is despite the fact that by far the most high-profile result that the ITP has delivered so far, the benefits of rapamycin, actually WAS a late-onset study: it wasn't meant to be, but technical issues delayed the experiment.) In a nutshell, there is a huge bias against high-risk high-gain work.

The third thing that distinguishes SENS Foundation's approach is that we can transcend the "balkanisation" (silo mentality) that dominates mainstream academic funding. When one submits a grant application to NIA, it is evaluated by gerontologists, just as when one submits to NCI it is evaluated by oncologists, etc. What's wrong with this is that it biases the system immensely against cross-disciplinary proposals. SENS is a plan that brings together a large body of knowledge from gerontology but also a huge amount of expertise that was developed for other reasons entirely - to treat acute disease/injury, or in some cases for purposes that were not biomedical at all (notably environmental decontamination). It doesn't matter how robust the objective scientific and technological argument is for work of that sort: it will never compete (especially in today's very tight funding environment) with more single-topic proposals all of whose details can be understood by reviewers from a particular single field.

The final thing to mention, and this actually also answers your question to Vipul about basic versus translational research, is that SENS is a plan that has stood the test of time. I've been propounding it since 2000, well before SENS Foundation existed, and it used to come in for a lot of criticism (initially more in the form of off-the-record ridicule, and latterly, at my behest, in print), but in every single case that criticism was found to stem from ignorance on the part of the detractor, either of what I proposed or of published experimental work on which the proposal was based. That's why I'm now regularly asked to organise entire sessions at mainstream gerontology conferences, whereas as little as five years ago I would never even be invited to speak. It's also why the Research Advisory Board of SENS Foundation consists of such prestigious scientists. This is a very strong argument, in my view, for believing that now is the time to sink a proper amount of money into translational gerontology (though certainly not to cease doin basic biogerontology too). It's well known that basic scientists are often not the most far-sighted when it comes to seeing how to apply their discoveries (attitudes in 1900 to the feasibility of powered flight being the canonical example). It is therefore a source of concern that almost all the experts who have the ear of funders in this field are basic scientists, whose instinct is to carry on finding things out and to deprioritise the tedious business of applying that knowledge. SENS has achieved a gratisfying level of legitimacy in gerontology, but it is still foreign to most card-carrying gerontologists, and as such it remains essentially unfundable via mainstream mechanisms. Hence the need to create a philanthropy-driven entity, SENS Foundation, to get this work done.

Let me know if this helps, or if you have further questions.

Cheers, Aubrey




Hi Aubrey,

Thanks again for engaging so thoughtfully.

I agree that a new technology/treatment that could delay or reverse aging (or aspects of it) would be enormously valuable. Regarding the rest of your argument, this is a good example of the challenges I've been discussing in understanding biomedical research.

You state that you have a high-expected-value plan that the academic world can't recognize the value of because of shortcomings such as "balkanisation" and risk aversion. I believe it may be true that the academic world has such problems to a degree; however, I also believe that there are a lot of extremely talented people in academia and that they often (though not necessarily always) find ways to move forward on promising work. Without more subject-matter expertise (or the advice of someone with such expertise), I can't easily assess the technical merits of your argument or potential counterarguments. Hopefully we'll have a better system for doing so at some point in the future.

I'll be very interested to see Dario's thoughts on the matter if he responds. I'd cite Dario as an example of an academic who ultimately wants to do work of the greatest humanitarian value possible, regardless of whether it is prestigious work. And as my summary of our conversation shows, he acknowledges that the world of biomedical research may have certain suboptimal incentives, but didn't seem to think that these issues are leaving specific, visible outstanding research programs on the table the way that your email implies.

Best,
Holden



Excellent. I too am keen to see Dario's comments. Dario also has the advantage of being based just a few miles from SENS Foundation's research centre, so we can definitely get together f2f soon if he wants.

Cheers, Aubrey

 

 

CEA does not seem to be credibly high impact

10 Jonathan_Lee 21 February 2013 10:29AM

I am highly grateful to Alexey Morgunov and Adam Casey for reviewing and commenting on an earlier draft of this post, and pestering me into migrating the content from many emails to a somewhat coherent post.

Will Crouch has posted about the Centre for Effective Altruism and in a follow up post discussed questions in more detail. The general sense of the discussion of that post was that the arguments were convincing and that donating to CEA is a good idea. Recently, he visited Cambridge, primarily to discuss 80,000 hours, and several Cambridge LWers spoke with him. These discussions caused a number of us to substantially downgrade our estimates of the effectiveness of CEA, and made our concerns more concrete.

continue reading »

Giving What We Can September Internship

4 Larks 18 February 2013 08:03PM

Summary: advert for students to do charity cost-effectiveness research at Giving What We Can.

 

Do you want to join the fight against global poverty and gain experience of research or communications at one of the world's handful of organisations dedicated to improving the world as efficiently as possible? Giving What We Can is running a summer internship programme for students interested in promoting effective charitable giving. On the two-week programme (16th-27th September 2013) interns will gain training and experience in the area of their choice; either Cost-Effectiveness Research, Communications or Operations.

The date is cunningly placed sufficiently late in the year that students can do an internship with another company and then come to us afterwards; this is what I did last year.

The intership will take place in Oxford, UK. Housing and living expenses will be provided.

To apply

Please send us an email at internship@givingwhatwecan.org with your CV. The deadline for applications is 12:00 GMT on the 20th March 2013.

 

Roles availableResearch into charity cost-effectiveness

Giving What We Can conducts research to help people find the most cost effective charities to donate to, lead by our director of research, Overcoming Bias co-blogger Robert Wiblin. You can get a sense of the research here and see a full list of current projects here. Some sample areas of interest are:

   Evaluations of how effective particular charities or programmes are.

   Comparing efforts to reduce climate change to other ways of assisting the world’s poor.

   Biomedical research which could offer vaccines or cures for neglected diseases. 

   Political Advocacy - how worthwhile is it to lobby for better government aid?

Requirements: A quantitative background is strongly preferred, especially in statistics, mathematics and economics.

Communications: Media content creation

Creating infographics, videos and other materials to communicate our message about the power of giving and research on effective charity.

Requirements: experience with appropriate software, such as vector graphics or video editing packages.

Communications: Outreach

Research and reach out to relevant groups, from organisations we could work with to websites and online communities where we could build a reputation and broaden our member base. This will require both research into the most appropriate and receptive places to contact, and establishing a rapport with them before suggesting that a partnership of sorts be made.

Communications: Online outreach

Work with our social media manager to plan and implement social media strategies, and research the most effective way to convey Giving What We Can’s message to other online communities.

Requirements: a good understanding of social media strategy and the dynamic of online communities.

Operations: Legal/financial research

We have many projects in this area, but an example of a major one is reporting on how our activities fit with formally recognised charitable purposes. This will involve working towards the reports we have to file with the Charities Commission. Other projects include registering us as a charity overseas.

Requirements: Having studied law is helpful, but not required.

[LINK] Open Source Software Developer with Terminal Illness Hopes to Opt Out of Death

17 lsparrish 13 February 2013 05:57AM

Aaron Winborn writes:

 

TLDR: http://venturist.info/aaron-winborn-charity.html

So maybe you've heard about my plight, in which I wrestle Lou Gehrig in this losing battle to stay alive. And I use the phrase "staying alive" loosely, as many would shudder at the thought of becoming locked in with ALS, completely paralyzed, unable to move a muscle other than your eyes.

But that's only half the story. Wait for the punchline.

As if the physical challenges of adapting to new and increasingly debilitating disabilities were not enough, my wife and two young daughters are forced to watch helplessly as the man they knew loses the ability to lift a fork or scratch an itch, who just two years ago was able to lift his infant daughter and run with the 7-year-old. The emotional strain on my family is more than any family should have to bear. Not to mention the financial difficulties, which include big purchases such as a wheelchair van and home modifications, and ultimately round the clock nursing care, all of it exacerbated by the fact that we have had to give up my income both because of the illness and to qualify for disability and Medicaid.

Meet me, Aaron Winborn, software developer and author of Drupal Multimedia, champion of the open source software movement.

Years ago, I worked for the lady of death herself, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, the author of On Death and Dying. Of course, I knew that one day I would need to confront death, but like most people, I assumed it would be when I was old, not in the prime of my life. Not that I'm complaining; I have lived a full life, from living in a Buddhist monastery to living overseas, from marrying the woman of my dreams to having two wonderful daughters, from teaching in a radical school to building websites for progressive organizations, from running a flight simulator for the US Navy to working as a puppeteer.

I accept the fact of my inevitable death. But accepting death does not, I believe, mean simply rolling over and letting that old dog bite you. Regardless of the prevalent mindset in society that says that people die and so should you, get over it, I believe that the reality we experience of people living only to a few decades is about to be turned upside down.

Ray Kurzweil spells out a coming technological singularity, in which accelerating technologies reach a critical mass and we reach a post-human world. He boldly predicts this will happen by the year 2045. I figured that if I could make it to 2035, my late 60s, that I would be able to take advantage of whatever medical advances were available and ride the wave to a radically extended lifespan.

ALS dictates otherwise. 50% of everyone diagnosed will die within 2 to 3 years of the onset of the disease. 80% will be gone in 5 years. And only 10% go on to survive a decade, most of them locked in, paralyzed completely, similar to Stephen Hawking. Sadly, my scores put me on the fast track of the 50%, and I am coming up quickly on 3 years.

Enter Kim Suozzi.

On June 10 of last year, her birthday, which is coincidentally my own, Kim Suozzi asked a question to the Internet, "Today is my 23rd birthday and probably my last. Anything awesome I should try before I die?" The answer that she received and acted on would probably be surprising to many.

On January 17, 2013, Kim Suozzi died, and as per her dying wish, was cryonically preserved.

She was a brave person, and I hope to meet her someday.

So yes, there we have it. The point that I am making with all this rambling. I hope to freeze my body after I die, in the hope of future medical technologies advancing to the point where they will be able to revive me.

The good news is that in the scheme of things, it is not too terribly expensive to have yourself cryonically preserved. You should look at it yourself; most people will fund it with a $35K-200K life insurance policy.

The bad news for me is that a life insurance policy is out of the question for me; a terminal illness precludes that as an option. Likewise, due to the financial hardships in store for us, self-funding is also out of the question.

When I learned about Kim Suozzi's plight, I reached out to the organization that set up the charity that ultimately funded her cryopreservation. The Society for Venturism, a non-profit that has raised funds for the eventual cryopreservation of terminally ill patients, agreed to take on my case.

Many of you reading this post have already helped out in so many ways. From volunteering your time and effort to our family, to donating money towards my Special Needs Trust to help provide a cushion for the difficult times ahead.

I am so grateful for all of this. It means so much to me and my family to know that there is such a large and generous community supporting us. I hate to ask for anything more, especially for something that may seem like an extravagance.

But is it really an extravagance?

If I were to ask for $100,000 for an experimental stem cell treatment, I doubt that we would even be having this conversation. No one in their right mind would even consider a potentially life-saving procedure to be an extravagance.

And what is cryonics, but a potentially life-saving procedure?

People choose from among many options for their bodies after death. Some choose to be buried, some choose cremation. Some choose to donate their bodies to science. That last is precisely what happens with cryonics: in addition to helping to answer the obvious question of will future revival from cold storage be possible, many developments in cryonics help modern medicine with the development of better preservation for organ transplantation and blood volume expanders.

Yes, I admit that the chances of it working are slim, but have you looked at the state of stem cell research for ALS lately? Consider that the only FDA approved medication to treat ALS, Rilutek, will on average add 3 months to one's lifespan, and you might begin to see my desperation.

But you should be happy with the life you've had. Why do you want to live forever?

The only reasonable response to that is to ask why do you want to die?

I love life. Every morning, even now with my body half paralyzed, I awaken with a new sense of purpose, excited to take on the day. There is so much I have yet to do. There are books to write, games to create, songs to sing. If I can get the use of my arms and hands again, there are gardens to plant, houses to build, space ships to fly. And oh, the people to love.

So please help me to realize this, my dying wish.

http://venturist.info/aaron-winborn-charity.html

"The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen."

- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross

 

Blog post: http://aaronwinborn.com/blogs/aaron/open-source-software-developer-terminal-illness-hopes-opt-out-death

Hacker news discussion: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5211602

Donation tradeoffs in conscientious objection

0 p4wnc6 27 December 2012 05:23PM

Suppose that you believe larger scale wars than current US military campaigns are looming in the next decade or two (this may be highly improbable, but let's condition on it for the moment). If you thought further that a military draft or other forms of conscription might be used, and you wanted to avoid military service if that situation arose, what steps should you take now to give yourself a high likelihood of being declared a conscientious objector?

I don't have numbers to back any of this up, but I am in the process of compiling them. My general thought is to break down the problem like so: Pr(serious injury or death | conscription) * Pr(conscription | my conscientious objector behavior & geopolitical conditions ripe for war) * Pr(geopolitical conditions ripe for war), assuming some conscientious objector behavior (or mixture distribution over several behaviors).

If I feel that Pr(serious injury or death | conscription) and Pr(geopolitical conditions ripe for war) are sufficiently high, then I might be motivated to pay some costs in order to drive Pr(conscription | my conscientious objector behavior) very low.

There's a funny bit in the American version of the show The Office where the manager, Michael, is concerned about his large credit card debt. The accountant, Oscar, mentions that declaring bankruptcy is an option, and so Michael walks out into the main office area and yells, "I DECLARE BANKRUPTCY!"

In a similar vein, I don't think that draft boards will accept the "excuse" that a given person has "merely" frequently expressed pacifist views. So if someone wants to robustly signal that she or he is a conscientious objector, what to do? In my ~30 minutes of searching, I've found a few organizations that, on first glance, look worthy of further investigation and perhaps regular donations.

Here are the few I've focused on most:

Center on Conscience and War

Coffee Strong

War-Resister's International

 

The problems I'm thinking about along these lines include:

  1. Whether or not the donation cost is worth it. There's no Giving What We Can type measure for this as far as I can tell, and even though I know from family experience that veteran mental illness can be very bad, I'm not convinced that donations to the above organizations provide a lot of QALY bang for the buck.
  2. Another component of bang for the buck is how much the donation will credibly signal that I actually am a serious conscientious objector. If I donate and then a draft board chooses to ignore it, it would be totally wasted. But if I think that 'going to war' is highly correlated with very significant negative outcomes, then just as with cryonics, I might feel that such costs are worth it even for a small probability of avoiding a combat environment.
  3. Even assuming that I resolve 1 & 2, there's the problem of trading off these donations with other donations that I make. In a self-interest line of thinking, I might forego my current donations to places like SIAI or Against Malaria because, good as those are, they may not offer the same shorter term benefits to me as purchasing a conscientious objector signal.

 

I'm curious if others have thought about this. Good literature references are welcome. My plan is to compile statistics that let me make reasonable estimates of the different conditional probabilities.

 

Addendum

Several people seem very concerned with the signal faker aspect of this question. I don't understand the preoccupation with this and feel tired of trying to justify the question to people who only care about the signal faker aspect. So I'll just add this copy of one of my comments from below. Hopefully this gives some additional perspective, though I don't expect it to change anyone's mind. I still stand by the post as-is: it's asking about a conditional question based on sincere belief. Even if the answer would be of interest to fakers too, that alone doesn't make that explanation more likely and even if that explanation was more likely it doesn't make the question unworthy of thoughtful answers.

Here's the promised comment:

... my question is conditional. Assume that you already sincerely believe in conscientious objection, in the sense of personal ideology such that you could describe it to a draft board. Now that we're conditioning on that, and we assume already that your primary goal is to avoid causing harm or death... then further ask what behaviors might be best to generate the kinds of signals that will work to convince a draft board. Merely having actual pacifist beliefs is not enough. Someone could have those beliefs but then do actions that poorly communicate them to a draft board. Someone else could have those beliefs and do behaviors that more successfully communicate them to draft boards. And to whatever extent there are behaviors outside of the scope of just giving an account of one's ideology I am asking to analyze the effectiveness.

I really think my question is pretty simple. Assume your goal is genuine pacifism but that you're worried this won't convince a draft board. What should you do? Is donation a good idea? Yes, these could be questions a faker would ask. So what? They could also be questions a sincere person would ask, and I don't see any reason for all the downvoting or questions about signal faking. Why not just do the thought experiment where you assume that you are first a sincere conscientious objector and second a person concerned about draft board odds?

Stated another way:

1) Avoiding combat where I cause harm or death is the first priority, so if I have to go to jail or shoot myself in the foot to avoid it, so be it and if it comes to that, it's what I'll do. This is priority number one.

2) I can do things to improve my odds of never needing to face the situation described in (1) and to the extent that the behaviors are expedient (in a cost-benefit tradeoff sense) to do in my life, I'd like to do them now to help improve odds of (1)-avoidance later. Note that this in no way conflicts with being a genuine pacifist. It's just common sense. Yes, I'll avoid combat in costly ways if I have to. But I'd also be stupid to not even explore less costly ways to invest in combat-avoidance that could be better for me.

3) To the extent that (2) is true, I'd like to examine certain options, like donating to charities that assist with legal issues in conscientious objection, or which extend mental illness help to affected veterans, for their efficacy. There is still a cost to these things and given my conscientious objection preferences, I ought to weigh that cost.

 

[Link] The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.

28 [deleted] 02 December 2012 12:50PM

The Worst-Run Big City in the U.S.

A six page article that reads as a very interesting autopsy of what institutional dysfunction in the intersection of government and non-profits looks like. I recommend reading the whole thing.

Minus the alleged harassment, city government is filled with Yomi Agunbiades — and they're hardly ever disciplined, let alone fired. When asked, former Board of Supervisors President Aaron Peskin couldn't remember the last time a higher-up in city government was removed for incompetence. "There must have been somebody," he said at last, vainly searching for a name.

Accordingly, millions of taxpayer dollars are wasted on good ideas that fail for stupid reasons, and stupid ideas that fail for good reasons, and hardly anyone is taken to task.

The intrusion of politics into government pushes the city to enter long-term labor contracts it obviously can't afford, and no one is held accountable. A belief that good intentions matter more than results leads to inordinate amounts of government responsibility being shunted to nonprofits whose only documented achievement is to lobby the city for money. Meanwhile, piles of reports on how to remedy these problems go unread. There's no outrage, and nobody is disciplined, so things don't get fixed.

You don't say?

In 2007, the Department of Children, Youth, and Families (DCYF) held a seminar for the nonprofits vying for a piece of $78 million in funding. Grant seekers were told that in the next funding cycle, they would be required — for the first time — to provide quantifiable proof their programs were accomplishing something.

The room exploded with outrage. This wasn't fair. "What if we can bring in a family we've helped?" one nonprofit asked. Another offered: "We can tell you stories about the good work we do!" Not every organization is capable of demonstrating results, a nonprofit CEO complained. He suggested the city's funding process should actually penalize nonprofits able to measure results, so as to put everyone on an even footing. Heads nodded: This was a popular idea.

Reading this I had to bite my hand in frustration.

There are two lessons here. First, many San Francisco nonprofits believe they're entitled to money without having to prove that their programs work. Second, until 2007, the city agreed. Actually, most of the city still agrees. DCYF is the only city department that even attempts to track results. It's the model other departments are told to aspire to.

But Maria Su, DCYF's director, admitted that accountability is something her department still struggles with. It can track "output" — what a nonprofit does, how often, and with how many people — but it can't track "outcomes." It can't demonstrate that these outputs — the very things it pays nonprofits to do — are actually helping anyone.

"Believe me, there is still hostility to the idea that outcomes should be tracked," Su says. "I think we absolutely need to be able to provide that level of information. But it's still a work in progress." In the meantime, the city is spending about $500 million a year on programs that might or might not work.

What the efficient charity movement has done so far looks much more impressive in light of this. Reading the rest of the article I think you can on your own identify the problems caused by lost purposes, applause lights and a dozen or so other faults we've explored here for years.

Discussions here are in many respects a comforting illusion, this is what humanity is like out there in the real world, almost at its best, well educated, wealthy and interested in the public good.

Yes it really is that bad.

A Mathematical Explanation of Why Charity Donations Shouldn't Be Diversified

2 Vladimir_Nesov 20 September 2012 11:03AM

There is a standard argument against diversification of donations, popularly explained by Steven Landsburg in the essay Giving Your All. This post is an attempt to communicate a narrow special case of that argument in a form that resists misinterpretation better, for the benefit of people with a bit of mathematical training. Understanding this special case in detail might be useful as a stepping stone to the understanding of the more general argument. (If you already agree that one should donate only to the charity that provides the greatest marginal value, and that it makes sense to talk about the comparison of marginal value of different charities, there is probably no point in reading this post.)1

Suppose you are considering two charities, one that accomplishes the saving of antelopes, and the other the saving of babies. Depending on how much funding these charities secure, they are able to save respectively A antelopes and B babies, so the outcome can be described by a point (A,B) that specifies both pieces of data.

Let's say you have a complete transitive preference over possible values of (A,B), that is you can make a comparison between any two points, and if you prefer (A1,B1) over (A2,B2) and also (A2,B2) over (A3,B3), then you prefer (A1,B1) over (A3,B3). Let's further suppose that this preference can be represented by a sufficiently smooth real-valued function U(A,B), such that U(A1,B1)>U(A2,B2) precisely when you prefer (A1,B1) to (A2,B2). U doesn't need to be a utility function in the standard sense, since we won't be considering uncertainty, it only needs to represent ordering over individual points, so let's call it "preference level".

Let A(Ma) be the dependence of the number of antelopes saved by the Antelopes charity if it attains the level of funding Ma, and B(Mb) the corresponding function for the Babies charity. (For simplicity, let's work with U, A, B, Ma and Mb as variables that depend on each other in specified ways.)

You are considering a decision to donate, and at the moment the charities have already secured Ma and Mb amounts of money, sufficient to save A antelopes and B babies, which would result in your preference level U. You have a relatively small amount of money dM that you want to distribute between these charities. dM is such that it's small compared to Ma and Mb, and if donated to either charity, it will result in changes of A and B that are small compared to A and B, and in a change of U that is small compared to U.

continue reading »

[Link]: 80,000 hours blog

20 Larks 26 February 2012 02:34PM

Some of you probably aren't aware yet of the rather excellent High Impact Careers / 80,000 hours blog.

It covers topics about how to have the biggest impact with your career, including

The contributors include Carl Shuman, Will Crouch, Ben Todd and Katja Grace, with an impressively regular updating schedule at the moment.

The reasoning is obvious in retrospect, but is useful to have written down, especially with the research that's gone into the posts. - much like the Sequences in that regard.

One last roll of the dice

0 Mitchell_Porter 03 February 2012 01:59AM

Previous articles: Personal research update, Does functionalism imply dualism?, State your physical account of experienced color.

 

In phenomenology, there is a name for the world of experience, the "lifeworld". The lifeworld is the place where you exist, where time flows, and where things are actually green. One of the themes of the later work of Edmund Husserl is that a scientific image of the real world has been constructed, on the basis of which it is denied that various phenomena of the lifeworld exist anywhere, at any level of reality.

When I asked, in the previous post, for a few opinions about what color is and how it relates to the world according to current science, I was trying to gauge just how bad the eclipse of the lifeworld by theoretical conceptions is, among the readers of this site. I'd say there is a problem, but it's a problem that might be solved by patient discussion.

Someone called Automaton has given us a clear statement of the extreme position: nothing is actually green at any level of reality; even green experiences don't involve the existence of anything that is actually green; there is no green in reality, there is only "experience of green" which is not itself green. I see other responses which are just a step or two away from this extreme, but they don't deny the existence of actual color with that degree of unambiguity.

A few people talk about wavelengths of light, but I doubt that they want to assert that the light in question, as it traverses space, is actually colored green. Which returns us to the dilemma: either "experiences" exist and part of them is actually green, or you have to say that nothing exists, in any sense, at any level of reality, that is actually green. Either the lifeworld exists somewhere in reality, or you must assert, as does the philosopher quoted by Automaton, that all that exists are brain processes and words. Your color sensations aren't really there, you're "having a sensation" without there being a sensation in reality.

What about the other responses? kilobug seems to think that pi actually exists inside a computer calculating the digits of pi, and that this isn't dualist. Manfred thinks that "keeping definitions and referents distinct" would somehow answer the question of where in reality the actual shades of green are. drethelin says "The universe does not work how it feels to us it works" without explaining in physical terms what these feelings about reality are, and whether any of them is actually green. pedanterrific asks why wrangle about color rather than some other property (the answer is that the case of color makes this sort of problem as obvious as it ever gets). RomeoStevens suggests I look into Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins mentions qualia once in his book "On Intelligence", where he speculates about what sort of neural encoding might be the physical correlate of a color experience; but he doesn't say how or whether anything manages to be actually colored.

amcknight asks which of 9 theories of color listed in the SEP article on that subject I'm talking about. If you go a few paragraphs back from the list of 9 theories, you will see references to "color as it is in experience" or "color as a subjective quality". That's the type of color I'm talking about. The 9 theories are all ways of talking about "color as in physical objects", and focus on the properties of the external stimuli which cause a color sensation. The article gets around to talking about actual color, subjective or "phenomenal" color, only at the end.

Richard Kennaway comes closest to my position; he calls it an apparently impossible situation which we are actually living. I wouldn't put it quite like that; the only reason to call it impossible is if you are completely invested in an ontology lacking the so-called secondary qualities; if you aren't, it's just a problem to solve, not a paradox. But Richard comes closest (though who knows what Will Newsome is thinking). LW user "scientism" bites a different bullet to the eliminativists, and says colors are real and are properties of the external objects. That gets a point for realism, but it doesn't explain color in a dream or a hallucination.

Changing people's minds on this subject is an uphill battle, but people here are willing to talk, and most of these subjects have already been discussed for decades. There's ample opportunity to dissolve, not the problem, but the false solutions which only obscure the real problem, by drawing on the work of others; preferably before the future Rationality Institute starts mass-producing people who have the vice of quale-blindness as well as the virtues of rationality. Some of those people will go on to work on Friendly AI. So it's highly desirable that someone should do this. However, that would require time that I no longer have.

 

In this series of posts, I certainly didn't set out to focus on the issue of color. The first post is all about Friendly AI, the ontology of consciousness, and a hypothetical future discipline of quantum neurobiology. It may still be unclear why I think evidence for quantum computing in the brain could help with the ontological problems of consciousness. I feel that the brief discussion this week has produced some minor progress in explaining myself, which needs to be consolidated into something better. But see my remarks here about being able to collapse the dualistic distinction between mental and physical ontology in a tensor network ontology; also earlier remarks here about about mathematically representing the phenomenological ontology of consciousness. I don't consider myself dogmatic about what the answer is, just about the inadequacy of all existing solutions, though I respect my own ideas enough to want to pursue them, and to believe that doing so will be usefully instructive, even if they are wrong.

However, my time is up. In real life, my ability to continue even at this inadequate level hangs by a thread. I don't mean that I'm suicidal, I mean that I can't eat air. I spent a year getting to this level in physics, so I could perform this task. I have considerable momentum now, but it will go to waste unless I can keep going for a little longer - a few weeks, maybe a few months. That should be enough time to write something up that contains a result of genuine substance, and/or enough time to secure an economic basis for my existence in real life that permits me to keep going. I won't go into detail here about how slim my resources really are, or how adverse my conditions, but it has been the effort that you would want from someone who has important contributions to make, and nowhere to turn for direct assistance.[*] I've done what I can, these posts are the end of it, and the next few days will decide whether I can keep going, or whether I have to shut down my brain once again.

So, one final remark. Asking for donations doesn't seem to work yet. So what if I promise to pay you back? Then the only cost you bear is the opportunity cost and the slight risk of default. Ten years ago, Eliezer lent me the airfare to Atlanta for a few days of brainstorming. It took a while, but he did get that money back. I honor my commitments and this one is highly public. This really is the biggest bargain in existential risk mitigation and conceptual boundary-breaking that you'll ever get: not even a gift, just a loan is required. If you want to discuss a deal, don't do it here, but mail me at mitchtemporarily@hotmail.com. One person might be enough to make the difference.

[*]Really, I can't say that, that's an emotional statement. There has been lots of assistance, large and small, from people in my life. But it's been a struggle conducted at subsistence level the whole way.

 

ETA 6 Feb: I get to keep going.

Utilitarians probably wasting time on recreation

-7 nebulous 03 January 2012 10:54PM

[Post edited to use life expectancy data from estimated time of birth rather than from 2012 and avoid extra significant digits.]

[Edited again to make the title more to the point and less abrasive, change the math since I found that Uganda is not one of their top four countries aided, include an accurate figure for the average age of an AMF beneficiary, link to sources on life expectancy and mosquito net distribution data, and improve some wording.]

 

This post argues that working a job and donating the resultant money to the Against Malaria Foundation (AMF) is more beneficial than recreation from a utilitarian standpoint.

AMF, GiveWell's current top rated charity, distributes mosquito nets to people at high risk of contracting and dying from malaria. To find the amount of life saved by donating a dollar to AMF, I use the following formula: (average life expectancy in aided country - average age of beneficiary) / dollars AMF needs to save one life.

According to an email from AMF representative Rob Mather, the average age of an AMF beneficiary is 25-30. I'll pick the age 28 to be conservative on the amount of life saved per donation. I made a weighted average by nets distributed of the life expectancies of the top three countries that AMF has worked in (Zambia, Malawi, and Tanzania) to estimate the average life expectancy in a typical AMF-aided country.

Zambia has 332,660 nets distributed, Malawi has 355,400 nets distributed, and Tanzania has 131,293 nets distributed, for a total of 819,353. Zambia has ~41 percent of nets distributed among the top three, while Malawi has ~43 percent and Tanzania has ~16 percent. Zambia's life expectancy for the average 28-year-old beneficiary is 51.56 years, Malawi's is 51.08 years, and Tanzania's is 45.75 years. The average life expectancy for an AMF beneficiary in the top three aided countries multiplies and adds up to ~50.42 years. (Source on life expectancy. Source on net distribution.)

This means that the time saved per life saved is ~22 years. According to GiveWell, AMF needs just under two thousand dollars to save a life. 22 divided by two thousand is ~0.011 years saved per dollar, or ~4.0 days saved per dollar. Suppose that you gave up some recreation time and instead worked some part-time job such as filling out online surveys for five dollars an hour. If each dollar was donated to AMF, that would save ~20 days per hour, or ~480 hours per hour. If the highest-paying job you could work in your recreation time pays five dollars an hour, then to justify your spending time on recreation rather than on working and donating the money to AMF within an altruistic morality, your recreation time would need to be ~480 times as valuable as an equivalent amount of time in a third world person's life. Your recreation time would need to be even more valuable if a higher-paying job was available. Just multiply the available hourly salary by the amount of life AMF can save per dollar to find how much life you can save per hour.

If anyone has more accurate figures, please post them.

Holiday giving thread

13 Kaj_Sotala 23 December 2011 11:09AM

Since this is the season to respect the universe as a worthy foe and remember the challenges ahead of us, it felt appropriate that I should donate some money for a good cause. Then it occurred to me, why not use the opportunity to encourage somebody else to do so as well?

So, if you promise to donate money to either the Singularity Institute or the Future of Humanity Institute before the end of the year, and pledge that you wouldn't have done so without this opportunity, then I will match your donation dollar-for-dollar. Saying "I would have donated 50 dollars without this opportunity but with it I'll donate 75" is also fine - in that case I'll match the extra 25. I'll match up to a total of 100 EUR (about 130 USD at today's rate): first-come first-served, so get your matches while they're hot. EDIT: I hit my maximum total, but curiousepic is running a matching as well, see below!

Please feel free to also declare any of your (more or less) completely unrelated donations in this thread, or to set up your own matching pledges.

Matchings:

curiousepic matches up to a total of $1000 on donations to SI, SENS, or GiveWell. (Up to $800.)

Kaj Sotala matched up to a total of $130 on donations to SI or FHI. (Up to $130.)

Matched donations:

Barry_Cotter donated $25 to SI. (matched $25 each by curiousepic, Kaj Sotala)

Daniel_Burfoot donated $100 to SI. (matched $100 each by curiousepic, Kaj Sotala)

atucker donated $12/month to SI. (matched $5 by Kaj Sotala, $144? by curiousepic)

wmorgan donated $1531 to SI. (matched $531 by curiousepic)

Non-matched donations:

Dr_Manhattan donated $100 to SI.

lincolquirk donated $700 to SI, $300 to Against Malaria Foundation.

Normal_Anomaly donated $300 to Against Malaria Foundation.

[Link]: GiveWell is aiming to have a new #1 charity by December

19 Normal_Anomaly 29 November 2011 03:11AM

GiveWell, LessWrong's most cited organization for optimal philanthropy, is currently re-evaluating its charity rankings with the goal of naming a new #1 charity by December 2011. Essentially, VillageReach (the current top charity) has met all of its short-term funding needs, to the point where it no longer has the greatest marginal return.

Our current top-rated charity is VillageReach. In 2010, we directed over $1.1 million to it, which met its short-term funding needs (i.e., its needs for the next year or so).

VillageReach still has longer-term needs, and in the absence of other giving opportunities that we consider comparable, we’ve continued to feature it as #1 on our website. However, we’ve also been focusing most of our effort this year on identifying and investigating other potential top-rated charities, with the hope that we can refocus attention on an organization with shorter-term needs this December. (In general, the vast bulk of our impact on donations comes in December.) We believe that we will be able to do so. We don’t believe we’ll be able to recommend a giving opportunity as good as giving to VillageReach was last year, but given VillageReach’s lack of short-term (1-year) room for more funding, we do expect to have a different top recommendation by this December.

EDIT: The new charities are up! They are the Against Malaria Foundation and the Schistosomiasis Control Initiative.

New website on careers for optimal philanthropy

8 lukeprog 22 November 2011 08:06PM

80,000 hours (eightythousand.org) is a new website associated with High Impact Careers, a Giving What We Can-associated effort to inform the public about "professional philanthropy" and the fact that you can do more good as a banker or entrepreneur than as an aid worker. It recently got some BBC press, and there's a neat new video.

Related to efficient charity and optimal philanthropy. Also see scope insensitivity.

Writing feedback requested: activists should pursue a positive Singularity

3 michaelcurzi 16 November 2011 09:14PM

I managed to turn an essay assignment into an opportunity to write about the Singularity, and I thought I'd turn to LW for feedback on the paper. The paper is about Thomas Pogge, a German philosopher who works on institutional efforts to end poverty and is a pledger for Giving What We Can

I offer a basic argument that he and other poverty activists should work on creating a positive Singularity, sampling liberally from well-known Less Wrong arguments. It's more academic than I would prefer, and it includes some loose talk of 'duties' (which bothers me), but for its goals, these things shouldn't be a huge problem. But maybe they are - I want to know that too.

I've already turned the assignment in, but when I make a better version, I'll send the paper to Pogge himself. I'd like to see if I can successfully introduce him to these ideas. My one conversation with him indicates that he would be open to actually changing his mind. He's clearly thought deeply about how to do good, and may simply have not been exposed to the idea of the Singularity yet.

I want feedback on all aspects of the paper  - style, argumentation, clarity. Be as constructively cruel as I know only you can.

If anyone's up for it, fee free to add feedback using Track Changes and email me a copy - mjcurzi[at]wustl.edu. I obviously welcome comments on the thread as well.

You can read the paper here in various formats.

Upvotes for all. Thank you!

SI and Social Business

5 Nick_Roy 07 November 2011 11:25PM

I asked this question for the Q&A:

Non-profit organizations like SI need robust, sustainable resource strategies. Donations and grants are not reliable. According to my university Social Entrepreneurship course, social businesses are the best resource strategy available. The Singularity Summit is a profitable and expanding example of a social business. Is SI planning on creating more social businesses (either related or unrelated to the organization's mission) to address long-term funding needs?

I also recently asked this of Luke for his feedback post before the Q&A was up, and he mentioned in his response that SI is continuing to grow the Summit brand in a multifarious manner. Luke also asked me for additional social business ideas, citing a lack of staff working on the issue.

Less Wrong's collective intelligence trumps my own, so I'm fielding it to you. I do have a few ideas, but I'll hold off on proposing solutions at first. I find that this is a fascinating and difficult thought experiment in addition to its usefulness both for SI and as practice in recognizing opportunities.

Edited to add: I posted my own ideas concerning SI and social business in the comments. What are yours? Also, addressing some valid points made in the comments, what are some other innovative ways to fund SI?

LessWrong gaming community

-1 TwistingFingers 26 September 2011 02:19AM

Many of us enjoy expressing ourselves through electronic games. As such, I feel that this aspect of our lives should be shared among our fellow gamers in the LessWrong community.

Video games are a great way to reduce compartmentalization and learn real-world rationality skills. Indeed, what brings us together at LessWrong can often be our love of games; someone in the LessWrong community without this advantage might find learning rationality difficult. In this light, outreach into the transhumanist/rationalist community to promote gaming is low-hanging fruit for serving the future of humanity.

Please consider this post a unique opportunity to begin discussion of this important issue and facilitate further debate in the near future.

SIAI vs. FHI achievements, 2008-2010

28 Kaj_Sotala 25 September 2011 11:42AM

After reading the FHI achievement report for 2008-2010, I thought it might be useful to compare their achievements to those of SIAI during the same time period. Since SIAI does not have an equivalent report, I've mostly pulled the data of their achievements from the SIAI blog.

My intention here is to help figure out which organization makes better use of my donations. For that purpose, I'm only looking at actual concrete outputs, and ignoring achievements such as successful fundraising drives or the hiring of extra staff.

For citation counts, I'm using Google Scholar data as-is. Note that this will include both self-cites and some cites from pages that really shouldn't be counted, since Google Scholar seems to be a bit liberal about what it includes in its database. I'm unsure as to whether or not the citation counts are very meaningful, since there hasn't been much time for anyone to cite papers published in 2010, say. But I'm including them anyway.

Future of Humanity Institute

Publications. The Achievement Report highlights three books and 22 journal articles. In addition, FHI staff has written 34 book chapters for academic volumes, including Companion to Philosophy of Technology; New Waves in Philosophy of Technology; Philosophy: Theoretical and Empirical Explorations; and Oxford Handbook of Neuroethics.

The three are the hardcover and paperback editions of Human Enhancement, as well as a paperback edition of Anthropic Bias: Observation Selection Effects in Science and Philosophy. Human Enhancement has been cited 22 times. Anthropic Bias was originally published in 2002, so I'm not including its citation count.

The highlighted 22 journal articles had been cited 59 times in total. The overwhelmingly most cited article was Cognitive Enhancement: Methods, Ethics, Regulatory Challenges in Science and Engineering Ethics, with 39 cites. The runner-up was Probing the Improbable: Methodological. Challenges for Risks with Low Probabilities and High Stake, with 5 cites. The remaining articles had 0-3 cites. But while Cognitive Enhancement is listed as a 2009 paper, it's worth noting that the first draft version of it was posted on Nick Bostrom's website back in 2006, and it has had time to accumulate cites since then. If we exclude it, FHI's 2008-2010 papers have been cited 20 times.

It's not listed in the Achievement Report, but I also want to include the 2008 Whole Brain Emulation Roadmap, which has been cited 15 times, bringing the total count (excluding Cognitive Enhancement) to 35.

Presentations. FHI members have given a total of 95 invited lectures and conference presentations.

Media appearances. Some 100 media appearances, including print, radio, and television appearances, since January 2009. These include BBC television, New Scientist, National Geographic, The Guardian, ITV, Bloomberg News, Discovery Channel, ABC, Radio Slovenia, Wired Magazine, BBC world service, Volkskrant (German newspaper), Utbildningsradion (Swedish national radio), Mehr News Agency (Iranian), Mladina Weekly (Slovenian magazine), Jyllands-Posten and Weekenavisen (Danish newspapers), Bayerisher Rundfunk (German radio), The History Channel, O Estado de São Paulo (Brazillian newspaper), Euronews, Kvallsposten (Swedish newspaper), City Helsinki (Finnish radio), Focus, Dutch Film and Television Academy, The Smart Manager (Indian magazine), Il Sole 24 Ore (Italian monthly), The Bulletin of the Atomic Sciences, Time Magazine, Astronomy Now, and Radio Bar-Kulan (Kenya).

Visitors. "The Institute receives many requests from students and scholars who wish to visit the Institute, only a few of which are accepted because of capacity limitations. The FHI has hosted a number of distinguished academic visitors over the past two years within its various areas of activity, such as Profs. David Chalmers, Michael Oppenheimer, and Thomas Homer-Dixon."

Policy advice. The Achievement Report highlights 23 groups or events which have received policy advice from either Nick Bostrom or Anders Sandberg. These include the World Economic Forum, the Public Services Offices of the Prime Minister's Office of Singapore, the UK Home Office, If (Stockholm insurance company), Jane Street Capital, IARPA (Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) for US Government, The Swedish Institute for Infectious Disease Control, and setting up a research network, "A differential view of enhancement", within the Volkswagen Foundation.

Organized events. Three organized events. 1: Cognitive Enhancement Workshop. 2: Symposium on cognitive enhancement and related ethical and policy issues. 3: Uncertainty, Lags and Nonlinearity: Challenges to governance in a turbulent world.

Singularity Institute

Publications. The SIAI publications page has 15 papers from the 2008-2010 period, of which 11 are listed under "recent publications", 1 under "software", and 3 under "talks and working papers". Of these, Superintelligence does not imply benevolence has been cited once. The rest all have no citations.

The Sequences were written during this time period. They consist of about a million words, and might very well have a bigger impact than all the other FHI and SIAI articles together - though that's very hard to quantify.

Presentations and Media Appearances. The SIAI blog mentions a number of media appearances and presentations at various venues, but I don't have the energy to go through them all and count. From a quick eyeballing of the blog, though, SIAI has nowhere near as many presentations and media appearances as FHI.

Visitors. The Visiting Fellows page has a list of 27 Visiting Fellows from around the world, who attend or hold degrees from universities including Harvard, Stanford, Yale, Cambridge, Carnegie Mellon, Auckland University, Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, and the University of California-Santa Barbara

Online communities and tools. Less Wrong was founded in 2009, and Google Analytics says that by the end of 2010, it had had over a million unique visitors.

Note that LW is an interesting case: as an FHI/SIAI collaboration, both organizations claim credit for it. However, since LW is to such a huge extent Eliezer's creation, and I'm not sure of what exactly the FHI contribution to LW is, I'm counting it as an SIAI and not a joint achievement.

SIAI also created the Uncertain Future, a tool for estimating the probability of AI.

Organized events. SIAI held Singularity Summits on all three years. The first Singularity Summit Australia was held in 2010. In 2008, SIAI co-sponsored the Converge unconference.

Ben Goertzel, acting as the SIAI Director of Research at the time, organized the 2008 and 2009 conferences on Artificial General Intelligence. He also co-organized a 2009 workshop on machine consciousness,

Artificial Intelligence projects. SIAI provided initial funding for the OpenCog project, as well as sponsoring Google Summer of Code events relating to the project in 2008 and 2009.

Overall

Based on this data, which organization is more deserving of my money? Hard to say, especially since SIAI has been changing a lot. The general AGI research, for instance, isn't really something that's being pursued anymore, and Ben Goertzel is no longer with the organization. Eliezer is no longer writing the sequences, which were possibly the biggest SIAI achievement of the whole 2008-2010 period.

Still, FHI's accomplishments seem a lot more impressive overall, suggesting that they might be a better target for the money. On the other hand, they are not as tightly focused on AI as SIAI is.

One imporant question is also the amount of funding the two organizations have had: accomplishing a lot is easier if you have more money. If an organization has thrice as much money, they should be expected to achieve thrice as much. SIAI's revenue was $426,000 in 2008 and $628,000 in 2009. FHI's funding was around $711,000 for 10/2008 - 10/2009. I don't know the 2010 figure for either organization. The FHI report also says the following:

To appreciate the significance of what has been accomplished, it should be kept in mind that the FHI has been understaffed for much of this period. One of our James Martin Research Fellows, Dr Rebecca Roache, has been on maternity leave for the past year. Our newest James Martin Research Fellow, Dr Eric Mandelbaum, who was recruited from an extremely strong field of over 170 applicants, has been in post for only two months. Thus, for half of the two-year period, FHI’s research staff has consisted of two persons, Professor Nick Bostrom and Dr Anders Sandberg.

SIAI - An Examination notes that in both 2008 and 2009, SIAI paid salaries to three people, so for a while at least, the amount of full-time staff in the two organizations was roughly comparable.

Case study: Folding@home

12 gwern 15 September 2011 06:55PM

Latest in an irregular series, some of whose previous entries were Edge.org and the Girl Scouts...

I examine the Folding@home distributed computing project with reference to the costs (electricity resulting in air pollution causing deaths) and benefits (some papers): http://www.gwern.net/Charity is not about helping. Additional data on either side of the cost-benefit is welcome.

(I also recently split out my essay describing things I have changed my mind on.)

Case Study: Reading Edge's financial filings

15 gwern 06 September 2011 03:46AM

(US only) Donate $2 to charity (bing rewards)

-1 Jonathan_Graehl 18 August 2011 09:16PM

Probably not worth most of your time, but if you already have a Windows Live account, log in here and you earn enough Bing reward points (whatever those are) to donate $2 to charity - http://www.bing.com/rewards/signup/web

Unfortunately, the charity selection is limited to a couple of "better educate the poor" organizations.

The Whistleblower

-5 MatthewBaker 15 August 2011 09:13PM

I recently saw this movie about the UN Scandal involving sex trafficking and was surprised by the conclusion. Instead of a neat little bow on the issue it left me with a ton of questions about what was being done to change things in the other parts of the world and how I could best contribute to that. I wanted to make this discussion post to ask for any of your opinions on the movie and perhaps some guidance for my upcoming top level post on the subject

 

-Matt

I thought more about my feelings on this subject and re-summarized them here.

I read it and I thought it was amazingly similar to a lot of the thoughts and feelings I've had going through my head recently. Maybe this is just the emotion and fallow of youth but I feel like the world as a whole is very apathetic towards the suffering that exists outside of the bubble of the First World that LW exists in. How can you honestly choose cryonics over the utility of an organization built to protect human life until the singularity along with Eliezer's group which works to ensure a positive singularity.

I recently saw a movie about government corruption and the UN dealing with it in Europe when it comes to fighting the sex trafficking industry, the courage it takes to fight oppression around the world is rare and expensive to come by but its definitely something we need more of. Once I master the art of willpower I intend to devote even more time to this pursuit, and I hope others will do the same.

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