The Future of Humanity Institute* recently secured funding for a new Research Collaboration with Amlin Insurance focusing on systemic risks associated with risk modelling. We're looking for someone with an academic background or interests and management/organisational abilities to coordinate and develop this project and area of research.

Who we need

This is a unique opportunity to build a world-leading research programme. We’re looking for someone who can not only manage this project, but who also has the drive and initiative to find new sources of funding, network with leading experts, and design future plans for the project. We’re also looking for someone who understands and is motivated by the aims of the FHI; the post-holder will have the opportunity to contribute across the board to FHI projects, and may be a crucial part of the FHI’s success going forward.

It’s a two year position, but there will be the possibility of extension depending on the success of the project and the acquisition of further funding. We can sponsor a visa. All the details can be found here.

Why can you make a big difference in this role?

I’ve spoken to 80,000 hours in the past about the impact a talented person can have in academic project management; this Nature article also talks about the importance of this area of work. MIRI's recent successes are also in part due to the work of some excellent people with the right mix of research understanding and organisation-running ability.

While this is not a research post, your work will increase the success and impact of research done by each one of a team of top-tier academics, and will bring yet more high-quality researchers into the most important fields. This makes this position a way to achieve a huge amount of accumulative good.  With a successful funding, development and media strategy, you can contribute to shaping the fields that the FHI is leading the world in.

More on the project

Systemic risks concern the stability of an entire market, and are of great importance to managing large-scale risk. The very methods used to model these phenomena can themselves be a source of systemic risk, especially when they embody hidden assumptions that may not remain reliable in a fast-changing world. The project will focus on gaining a better understanding of systemic risks, particularly as they apply to catastropic risk modelling, and ways to avoid or mitigate such risks. Subtopics of interest are likely to include:

• Ways in which individually rational agents can misbehave when they become part of a larger network.
• Decision making under uncertainty.
• Cognitive biases that emerge when dealing with large risks, and when using the information pipelines used to model catastrophic events.
• How to model potential existential risks.

The current project research team are: Anders Sandberg, Stuart Armstrong and Nick Beckstead.

Closing date is 19th July.

For questions about the position please email me at sean.oheigeartaigh@philosophy.ox.ac.uk; Stuart Armstrong should also be able to answer questions. I'll try to answer as many as queries as I can, but I apologise in advance if I don't get to everyone - workload at present is very heavy. We'd be very grateful for any help in spreading the word to good people who might be interested. Thank you!

*The Future of Humanity Institute

The Future of Humanity Institute (Oxford) is a world-leading research centre looking at big-picture questions for human civilization.  With the tools of mathematics, philosophy, and science, we explore the risks and opportunities that will arise from technological change, weigh ethical dilemmas, and evaluate global priorities.  Our goal is to clarify the choices that will shape humanity’s long-term future.

I'm spending the summer working to update lesswrong, and one of the changes we're looking to implement is changing the "New on Overcoming Bias" part of the sidebar to a more general "New on Rationality Blogs".  What blogs would you like to see represented?

[NOTE: This post has undergone substantial revisions following feedback in the comments section.  The basic complaint was that it was too airy and light on concrete examples and recommendations.  So I've said oops, applied the virtue of narrowness, gotten specific, and hopefully made this what it should've been the first time.]  

Take a moment and picture a master surgeon about to begin an operation.  Visualize the room (white, bright overhead lights), his clothes (green scrubs, white mask and gloves), the patient, under anesthesia and awaiting the first incision. There are several other people, maybe three or four, strategically placed and preparing for the task ahead.  Visualize his tools - it's okay if you don't actually know what tools a surgeon uses, but imagine how they might be arranged.  Do you picture them in a giant heap which the surgeon must dig through every time he wants something, or would they be arranged neatly (possibly in the order they'll be used) and where they can be identified instantly by sight?  Visualize their working area.  Would it be conducive to have random machines and equipment all over the place, or would every single item within arms reach be put there on purpose because it is relevant, with nothing left over to distract the team from their job for even a moment?    

Space is important.  You are a spatially extended being interacting with spatially extended objects which can and must be arranged spatially.  In the same way it may not have occurred to you that there is a correct way to have things, it may not have occurred to you that space is something you can use poorly or well.  The stakes aren't always as high as they are for a surgeon, and I'm sure there are plenty of productive people who don't do a single one of the things I'm going to talk about.  But there are also skinny people who eat lots of cheesecake, and that doesn't mean cheesecake is good for you.  Improving how you use the scarce resource of space can reduce task completion time, help in getting organized, make you less error-prone and forgetful, and free up some internal computational resources, among other things.  

What Does Using Space Well Mean?

It means consciously manipulating the arrangement, visibility, prominence, etc. of objects in your environment to change how they affect cognition (yours or other people's).  The Intelligent Use of Space (Kirsh, "The Intelligent Use of Space", 1995) is a great place to start if you're skeptical that there is anything here worth considering.  It's my primary source for this post because it is thorough but not overly technical, contains lots of clear examples, and many of the related papers I read were about deeper theoretical issues.  

The abstract of the paper reads:

How we manage the spatial arrangement of items around us is not an afterthought: it is an integral part of the way we think, plan, and behave. The proposed classification has three main categories: spatial arrangements that simplify choice; spatial arrangements that simplify perception; and spatial dynamics that simplify internal computation. The data for such a classification is drawn from videos of cooking, assembly and packing, everyday observations in supermarkets, workshops and playrooms, and experimental studies of subjects playing Tetris, the computer game. This study, therefore, focuses on interactive processes in the medium and short term: on how agents set up their workplace for particular tasks, and how they continuously manage that workplace.

The 'three main categories' of simplifying choice, perception, and internal computation can be further subdivided:

  simplifying choice

      reducing or emphasizing options.

      creating the potential for useful new choices.

  simplifying perception

      clustering like objects.

      marking an object.

      enhancing perceptual ability.

  simplfying internal computation

     doing more outside of your head.

These sub-categories are easier to picture and thus more useful when trying to apply the concept of using space correctly, and I've provided more illustrations below. It's worth pointing out that (Kirsh, "The Intelligent Use of Space", 1995) only considered the behavior of experts.  Perhaps effective space management partially explains expert's ability to do more of their processing offline and without much conscious planning.  An obvious follow up would be in examining how novices utilize space and looking for discrepancies.  

What Does Using Space Well Look Like?

The paper walks the reader through a variety of examples of good utilization of space.  Consider an expert cook going through the process of making a salad with many different ingredients, and ask how you would accomplish the same task differently:

...one subject we videotaped, cut each vegetable into thin slices and laid them out in tidy rows. There was a row of tomatoes, of mushrooms, and of red peppers, each of different length...To understand why lining up the ingredients in well ordered, neatly separated rows is clever, requires understanding a fact about human psychophysics: estimation of length is easier and more reliable than estimation of area or volume. By using length to encode number she created a cue or signal in the world which she could accurately track. Laying out slices in lines allows more precise judgment of the property relative number remaining than clustering the slices into groups, or piling them up into heaps. Hence because of the way the human perceptual system works, lining up the slices creates an observable property that facilitates execution.

Here, the cook used clustering and clever arrangement to make better use of her eyes and to reduce the load on her working memory, techniques I use myself in my day job.  As of this writing (2013) I'm teaching English in Korea.  I have a desk, a bunch of books, pencils, erasers, the works.  All the folders are together, the books are separated by level, and all ungraded homework is kept in its own place.  At the start of the work day I take out all the books and folders I'll need for that day and arrange them in the same order as my classes. When I get done with a class the book goes back on the day's pile but rotated 90 degrees so that I can tell it's been used. When I'm totally done with a book and I've entered homework scores and such, it goes back in the main book stack where all my books are.  I can tell at a glance which classes I've had, which ones I'll have, what order I'm in, which classes are finished but unprocessed, and which ones are finished and processed.  Cthulu only knows how much time I save and how many errors I prevent all by utilizing space well.  

These examples show how space can help you keep track of temporal order and make quick, accurate estimates, but it may not be clear how space can simplify choice.  Recall that simplifying choice usually breaks down into either taking some choices away or making good choices more obvious.  Taking choices away may sound like a bad thing, but each choice requires you to spend time evaluating options, and if you are juggling many different tasks the chance of making the wrong choice goes up.  Similarly, looking for good options soaks up time, unless you can find a way to make yourself trip over them.  

An example of removing bad decisions is in factory workers placing a rag on hot pipes so they know not to touch them (Kirsh, "The Intelligent Use of Space", 1995).  And here is how some carpenters structure their work space so that they can make good uses for odds and ends easier to see:

In the course of making a piece of furniture one periodically tidies up. But not completely. Small pieces of wood are pushed into a corner or left about; tools, screw drivers and mallets are kept nearby. The reason most often reported is that 'they come in handy'. Scraps of wood can serve to protect surfaces from marring when clamped, hammered or put under pressure. They can elevate a piece when being lacquered to prevent sticking. The list goes on.

By symbolically marking a dangerous object the engineers are shutting down the class of actions which involves touching the pipe. It is all too easy in the course of juggling multiple aspects of a task to forget something like this and injure yourself.  The strategically placed and obvious visual marker means that the environment keeps track of the danger for you.  Likewise poisonous substances have clear warning labels and are kept away from anything you might eat; both precautions count as good use of space.

My copy of Steven Johnson's Where Good Ideas Come From is on another continent, but the carpenter example reminded me of his recommendation to keep messy notebooks.  Doing so makes it more likely you'll see unusual and interesting connections between things you're thinking about.  He goes so far as to use a tool called DevonThink which speeds this process up for him.

And while I'm at it, this also points to one advantage of having physical books over PDFs.  My books take up space and are easier to see than their equivalent 1's and 0's on a hard drive, so I'm always reminded of what I have left to read. More than once I've gone on a useful tangent because the book title or cover image caught my attention, and more than one interesting conversation got started when a visitor was looking over my book collection.  Scanning the shelves at a good university library is even better, kind of like 17th-century StumbleUpon, and English-language libraries are something I've sorely missed while I've been in Asia.  

All this usefulness derives from the spatial properties and arrangement of books, and I have no idea how it can be replicated with the Kindle.  

Specific Recommendations

You can see from the list of examples I've provided that there are a billion ways of incorporating these insights into work, life, and recreation.  By discussing the concept I hope to have drawn your attention to the ways in which space is a resource, and I suspect just doing this is enough to get a lot of people to see how they can improve their use of space.  Here are some more ideas, in no particular order:

-I put my alarm clock far enough away from my bed so that I have to actually get up to turn it off.  This is so amazingly    effective at ensuring I get up in the morning that I often hate my previous-night's self.  Most of the time I can't go back to  sleep even when I try.   

-There's reason to suspect that a few extra monitors or a bigger display will make your life easier  [Thanks Qiaochu_Yuan].

-When doing research for an article like this one, open up all the tabs you'll need for the project in a separate window and close  each tab as you're done with it.  You'll be less distracted by something irrelevant and you won't have to remember what you did  or didn't read.  

-Having a separate space to do something seems to greatly increase the chances I'll get it done.  I tried not going to the gym  for a while and just doing push ups in my house, managing to keep that up for all of a week or so. Recently, I switched gyms,  and despite now having to take a bus all the way across town I make it to the gym 3-5 times a week, pretty much without fail.  If your studying/hacking/meditation isn't going well, try going somewhere which exists only to give people a  place to do that  thing.

-Put whatever you can't afford to forget when you leave the house right by the door.

-If something is really distracting you, completely remove it from the environment temporarily.  During one particularly strenuous  finals in college I not only turned off the xbox, I completely unplugged it and put it in a drawer.  Problem. Solved.  

-Alternatively, anything you're wanting to do more of should be out in the open.  Put your guitar stand or chess board or  whatever where you're going to see it frequently, and you'll engage with it more often.  This doubles as a signal to other  people, giving you an opportunity to manage their impression of you, learn more about them, and identify those with similar  interests to yours.  

-Make use of complementary strategies (Kirsh, "Complementary Strategies", 1995).  If you're having trouble comprehending    something, make a diagram, or write a list.  The linked paper describes a simple pilot study which involved two groups tasked  with counting coins, one which could use their hands and one which could not.  The 'no hands' group was more likely to make  errors and to take longer to complete the task.  Granted, this was a pilot study with sample size = 5, and the difference  wasn't that stark.  But it's worth thinking about next time you're stuck on a problem.    

-Complementary strategies can also include things you do with your body, which after all is just space you wear with you  everywhere.  Talk out loud to yourself if you're alone, give a mock presentation in which you summarize a position you're trying  to understand, keep track of arguments and counterarguments with your fingers.  I've always found the combination of  explaining something out loud to an imaginary person while walking or pacing to be especially potent.  Some of my best ideas  come to me while I'm hiking.    

-Try some of these embodied cognition hacks.

Summary and Conclusion

Space is a resource which, like all others, can be used effectively or not.  When used effectively, it acts to simplify choices, simplify perception, and simplify internal computation.  I've provided many examples of good space usage from all sorts of real-life domains in the hopes that you can apply some of these insights to live and work more effectively.  

Further Reading

[In the original post these references contained no links.  Sincere thanks to user Pablo_Stafforini for tracking them down]

Kirsh, D. (1995) The Intelligent Use of Space

Kirsh, D. (1999) Distributed Cognition, Coordination and Environment Design

Kirsh, D. (1998) Adaptive Rooms, Virtual Collaboration, and Cognitive Workflow

Kirsh, D. (1996) Adapting the Environment Instead of Oneself

Kirsh, D. (1995) Complementary Strategies: Why we use our hands when we think

As I mentioned in my strategic plan, I have 10 months and 28 days until I graduate from Denison University and hopefully will be transitioning to a career.  Careers are important because having one will not only mean that I won't starve, but that I'll have an opportunity to change the world.  As the career advice organization 80,000 Hours notes you'll be spending about 80,000 hours in a career, so you might as well use it to make as big of a difference as you can?  But what career should I pick?

Here are my starting thoughts and strategy...

Basic Philosophy and Strategy

My aim is to choose a career that will, taken as a whole, contribute the most to the world with regard to my utilitarian goals to increase total well-being.  "Taken as a whole" means that I'm not just considering the direct good of the first career itself, but also it's interaction with the rest of my life, it's indirect good, and how it might set me up to have an even better second career.

However, there is one catch: I furthermore want the job to be at least moderately enjoyable.  I would very much not like to be depressed or burnt out, and I suspect that would be bad for my utilitarian goals too.  If I think I would be miserable at my chosen job even if somehow it were to maximize total well-being, I still would not take it (despite this being immoral from a utilitarian standpoint).

I also would like to have a plan in place rather soon, so I can actually act upon preparing for it.  The earlier I pick a career plan, the more options will remain open.  Right now, I'm stuck, for better or for worse, with a psychology and political science major and unless I do something drastic, I won't be able to take any classes outside of those two majors for the rest of my time at Denison.

As a political science and psychology double major, I think I could be very well qualified for a job that involves research and/or statistics.  To get more of an idea of what I can do, feel free to look at my résumé and at my personal website.  I'll speculate a bit more about my qualifications later on in this essay.

The Scope of High-Impact Careers

The way I've been categorizing it, there are essentially only two different kinds of careers that promise to do lots of good -- funneling money to effective organizations and working for effective organizations, though some opportunities allow for some combination of both.

By effective organizations, I mean orgs like Giving What We Can, 80K Hours, Effective Animal Activism, The Life You Can Save, Center for Applied Rationality, Machine Intelligence Research Institute, Future of Humanity Institute, Leverage Research, The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, GiveWell, Against Malaria Foundation, Vegan Outreach, etc.  (Of course, the actual choice of organization would matter a great deal, and some of these organizations might actually not be effective for one reason or another, but I won't look at those arguments here.) 

Funneling money to effective organizations, in this case, involves only one opportunity -- earning to give, which I've summarized before. The basic idea is that you aim to pick a high income job and then donate as much as you can to an effective organization.

Working for effective organizations involves four other opportunities -- research, influence, fundraising, and/or direct work.  I say "and/or" because you could end up employed at a effective organization that allows you to so some combination of the four.  Research might involve working for a university working on an important question.  Direct work might involve assisting in the day-to-day opportunities of the organization.

Notably, research, influence, and perhaps even fundraising, could be carried out in one's free time, such as what I do through this blog.

My Perceived Opportunities in Earning to Give

I think earning to give is a great baseline for me to evaluate other opportunities from, even though I'm moderately confident I can do more impact through a different line of work.  What opportunities await?  Here are my guesses:

• Investment Banking: My guess is this is the highest earning career, when considering probability of achieving certain incomes multiplied by the quantity of income, and high incomes right out of college.  However, I'm only moderately qualified for it -- I think I have a good analytic mindset and have taken some economics and finance classes, but I'm not an economics major, and I've never done any finance internships.  Moreover, I don't think this job would be particularly enjoyable.  I see a high chance of failure to get a job and burnout once I get a job here.

• Law: Law seems like a high-earning career if you can make it big, but there's a low chance of making it big.  I've heard anecdotally that you basically need to get into a top law school or you won't be having a good time, assuming you can pay for that law school.  I think this would be moderately enjoyable and with Moot Court, a Constitutional law class, and a Political Science major, I'm as prepared for law as anyone can be in a liberal arts school.

• Consulting: Consulting offers high incomes right out of college, though the incomes might not be as high as other opportunities overall.  I'd say I'm as prepared for consulting as anyone can be in a liberal arts school, though I'm not an economics major.  Unfortunately, however, I'd guess that I'd really hate regular travel, so consulting might not be a good career path for me.

• Computer Programming: Computer programming also offers high incomes right out of college, provided you're talented at it.  I think I have the raw aptitude, but I don't have the formal training.  My guess is that if I wanted to go into programming, I'd have to pursue some additional education after Denison.

• Market Research: I think market research would also offer decently high incomes right out of college, and I'd be well qualified for it and I'd enjoy it.  This has always been one of my favorite choices.

• Engineering: Engineering would provide high incomes right out of college, but I have no experience with engineering.

• Medicine:  Doctors earn a lot, though they have high expenses with medical school.  Doctors seem to be like lawyers who have a more smooth earnings curve -- you'll earn a bit less overall, but you have a higher chance of success.  However, I don't think this is worth pursuing as I have no interest for it and I have never taken a single college-level biology course.

My Perceived Opportunities in Research

I've done really, really well in political science and think I'd have lots of aptitude as a political science Ph.D.  However, I don't think political science offers much opportunities to actually make an impact with one's research.  Psychology research, on the other hand, I do think has a wide variety of high impact questions to study, but I've only been moderately good at psychology and I'm unsure I'd get into a top Ph.D. program.  I also imagine I might have the general skills to survive in other social science programs, like economics research.

I thought about doing philosophy research, since most of the biggest questions seem to lie in the realm of philosophy right now.  However, I'm nearly certain I can do just as well or even better at philosophy research by just writing things on the internet.

My Perceived Opportunities in Influence/Fundraising

I don't know if there's much I could do in influence beyond what I'm already doing.  I suspect my only options are to either retire early and blog full-time (it's not that hard to retire permanently by age 30 with a high enough income and savings rate).  That seems unlikely to be my best choice.

I could go work on behalf of an effective organization, which seems promising.

Or I could always retire early and then work for an effective organization, as well, which would have the added benefit of not needing them to pay me.

A career in politics is unlikely to be high impact as a first career, and I've probably already burned myself from running for higher office with public statements of outside-the-mainstream views.

My Perceived Opportunities in Direct Work

I think this is the same as the above.  I think I'd enjoy working for an effective organization directly.

One interesting idea is to be a personal assistant to someone who is high-impact to boost their impact.  I'm not sure how good I am at this, however, and I'd feel like I could do better.  I'm also not sure if this would be fun, though it could be.  I suppose it depends on the person I'd work with.

Conclusion

This essay is good in making my career plans a lot less vague.  But it's full of guesses and I'm definitely missing a lot.  What do I plan on doing from here?

• Get a significant amount of advice on this draft.  I'll be visiting England this summer and hope to stop by 80K and get advice from a bunch of cool people in person.  I'll sign up for another 80k coaching session (my first one got a bit derailed).  I also plan on talking to people not affiliated with 80K.  Just by passing this draft around, I hope to get more advice on how to modify it.  (Hint: You should give me advice on careers or advice on how to find good advice.)

• Do more personal research.  80K has a lot of research, but they might not be going fast enough for me to make it in time, and I might need to pick up some of what they don't have, to the best of my ability.  Finding salary information for my favorite jobs would be a good start.

• Choose a few paths to pursue and build toward them.  I can apply to jobs and graduate programs simultaneously while still figuring things out.

• Work on the LSAT and GRE.  I need to take these two tests for law school and Ph.D. programs respectively.  I also might need graduate school for non-Ph.D. career advancement.  I'll get the practice tests ready.

• Keep writing about this.  I'd imagine there's a lot of benefit for both me and others in creating more documentation and discussion around career choice for making the world a better place.

ETA: ModusPonies has set up a Google Group for everyone doing this.  It looks like it's officially a Thing.

I originally asked this on the London Less Wrong mailing list, but then realised the internet doesn't just have a ten mile radius.

There's been some interest in public speaking on LW lately, and it cropped up a couple of times at the London practical meetup as an area people would like to work on.  I volunteered to collate some exercises and resources on the subject.

Since then, I've noticed a Coursera course on public speaking which is starting in a little under two weeks.  I've signed up for it, and would like to encourage other LessWrongers to sign up for it alongside me.  My reasons for this are as follows:

- The course involves the option of recording your progress and sharing it with other participants.  As several of us have discovered on the Less Wrong Study Hall, seeing the faces of people you chat to on the internet is fun, sociable and motivational.

- We can read posts and articles on the subject all day long, but having an externally-imposed syllabus will provide the structure and motivation to actually act on it.

- There is an aspect of rhetoric and persuasion to the course, (cf. 'dark arts'), and having epistemically hygienic fellows will help keep participants on the straight-and-narrow.

- Turning a large number of aspiring rationalists into erudite and persuasive speakers can't be a bad thing.

So who else is in?

(Also, before anyone mentions it, yes, I am very, very aware of the existence of Toastmasters.  They seem to be the default suggestion whenever public speaking comes up.  For anyone who isn't aware of them, they are an international organisation of clubs practising communication and public speaking.  Google them if you're interested.  I'm not, for social- and time-commitment reasons.)

I was raised as a good and proper child of the Enlightenment who grew up reading The Incredible Bread Machine and A Step Farther Out, taking for granted that economic growth was a huge in-practice component of human utility (plausibly the majority component if you asked yourself what was the major difference between the 21st century and the Middle Ages) and that the "Small is Beautiful" / "Sustainable Growth" crowds were living in impossible dreamworlds that rejected quantitative thinking in favor of protesting against nuclear power plants.

And so far as I know, such a view would still be an excellent first-order approximation if we were going to carry on into the future by steady technological progress:  Economic growth = good.

But suppose my main-line projection is correct and the "probability of an OK outcome" / "astronomical benefit" scenario essentially comes down to a race between Friendly AI and unFriendly AI.  So far as I can tell, the most likely reason we wouldn't get Friendly AI is the total serial research depth required to develop and implement a strong-enough theory of stable self-improvement with a possible side order of failing to solve the goal transfer problem.  Relative to UFAI, FAI work seems like it would be mathier and more insight-based, where UFAI can more easily cobble together lots of pieces.  This means that UFAI parallelizes better than FAI.  UFAI also probably benefits from brute-force computing power more than FAI.  Both of these imply, so far as I can tell, that slower economic growth is good news for FAI; it lengthens the deadline to UFAI and gives us more time to get the job done.  I have sometimes thought half-jokingly and half-anthropically that I ought to try to find investment scenarios based on a continued Great Stagnation and an indefinite Great Recession where the whole developed world slowly goes the way of Spain, because these scenarios would account for a majority of surviving Everett branches.

Roughly, it seems to me like higher economic growth speeds up time and this is not a good thing.  I wish I had more time, not less, in which to work on FAI; I would prefer worlds in which this research can proceed at a relatively less frenzied pace and still succeed, worlds in which the default timelines to UFAI terminate in 2055 instead of 2035.

I have various cute ideas for things which could improve a country's economic growth.  The chance of these things eventuating seems small, the chance that they eventuate because I write about them seems tiny, and they would be good mainly for entertainment, links from econblogs, and possibly marginally impressing some people.  I was thinking about collecting them into a post called "The Nice Things We Can't Have" based on my prediction that various forces will block, e.g., the all-robotic all-electric car grid which could be relatively trivial to build using present-day technology - that we are too far into the Great Stagnation and the bureaucratic maturity of developed countries to get nice things anymore.  However I have a certain inhibition against trying things that would make everyone worse off if they actually succeeded, even if the probability of success is tiny.  And it's not completely impossible that we'll see some actual experiments with small nation-states in the next few decades, that some of the people doing those experiments will have read Less Wrong, or that successful experiments will spread (if the US ever legalizes robotic cars or tries a city with an all-robotic fleet, it'll be because China or Dubai or New Zealand tried it first).  Other EAs (effective altruists) care much more strongly about economic growth directly and are trying to increase it directly.  (An extremely understandable position which would typically be taken by good and virtuous people).

Throwing out remote, contrived scenarios where something accomplishes the opposite of its intended effect is cheap and meaningless (vide "But what if MIRI accomplishes the opposite of its purpose due to blah") but in this case I feel impelled to ask because my mainline visualization has the Great Stagnation being good news.  I certainly wish that economic growth would align with FAI because then my virtues would align and my optimal policies have fewer downsides, but I am also aware that wishing does not make something more likely (or less likely) in reality.

To head off some obvious types of bad reasoning in advance:  Yes, higher economic growth frees up resources for effective altruism and thereby increases resources going to FAI, but it also increases resources going to the AI field generally which is mostly pushing UFAI, and the problem arguendo is that UFAI parallelizes more easily.

Similarly, a planet with generally higher economic growth might develop intelligence amplification (IA) technology earlier.  But this general advancement of science will also accelerate UFAI, so you might just be decreasing the amount of FAI research that gets done before IA and decreasing the amount of time available after IA before UFAI.  Similarly to the more mundane idea that increased economic growth will produce more geniuses some of whom can work on FAI; there'd also be more geniuses working on UFAI, and UFAI probably parallelizes better and requires less serial depth of research.  If you concentrate on some single good effect on blah and neglect the corresponding speeding-up of UFAI timelines, you will obviously be able to generate spurious arguments for economic growth having a positive effect on the balance.

So I pose the question:  "Is slower economic growth good news?" or "Do you think Everett branches with 4% or 1% RGDP growth have a better chance of getting FAI before UFAI"?  So far as I can tell, my current mainline guesses imply, "Everett branches with slower economic growth contain more serial depth of cognitive causality and have more effective time left on the clock before they end due to UFAI, which favors FAI research over UFAI research".

This seems like a good parameter to have a grasp on for any number of reasons, and I can't recall it previously being debated in the x-risk / EA community.

EDIT:  To be clear, the idea is not that trying to deliberately slow world economic growth would be a maximally effective use of EA resources and better than current top targets; this seems likely to have very small marginal effects, and many such courses are risky.  The question is whether a good and virtuous person ought to avoid, or alternatively seize, any opportunities which come their way to help out on world economic growth.

EDIT 2:  Carl Shulman's opinion can be found on the Facebook discussion here.

While in a standard auction you have to pay your bid only if you win, in an all-pay auction you pay whether or not you win. The standard example is a dollar auction where you're selling a dollar. Bidding a penny to get a dollar seems reasonable, but someone else then might bid two cents. The bidding can keep going even past a dollar, and the more people fighting for the dollar the more the person selling it makes. Bidding-fee auctions are similar, where each bid you make costs money. You might remember Swoopo? They used to put up ads like "An iPad just sold for $21.32!" not mentioning that the participants overall had spent more than the retail cost of the iPad on bidding fees. Eventually people caught on and they went bankrupt.

In a less scammy vein, however, this is also how competitive prizes work. In the X-Prize teams spent over $100M in competition for a $10M prize. I can't find an estimate for how much people spent to win the $1M Netflix Prize but when you look at the number of people and number of teams it was probably well above $1M.

Could we use this for charity? Imagine a donor thought two charities were both excellent and had very similar returns, but they knew lots of other people strongly disagreed and preferred one or the other. By offering to donate $X to the charity that received the most in donations, could they move more than $X to the charity of their choice? It might be even better to make the criterion be the most independent donations of at least $Y, because getting more people to donate has value in terms of expected future donations.

(I suggested something similar a few months ago in a comment on my post on donation matching, but hadn't thought about prizes at the time.)

See also: Boring Advice Repository, Solved Problems Repository, Grad Student Advice Repository

I often find that my understanding of the world is strongly informed by a few key concepts. For example, I've repeatedly found the concept of opportunity cost to be a useful frame. My previous post on privileging the question is in some sense about the opportunity cost of paying attention to certain kinds of questions (namely that you don't get to use that attention on other kinds of questions). Efficient charity can also be thought of in terms of the opportunity cost of donating inefficiently to charity. I've also found the concept of incentive structure very useful for thinking about the behavior of groups of people in aggregate (see perverse incentive). 

I'd like people to use this thread to post examples of concepts they've found particularly useful for understanding the world. I'm personally more interested in concepts that don't come from the Sequences, but comments describing a concept from the Sequences and explaining why you've found it useful may help people new to the Sequences. ("Useful" should be interpreted broadly: a concept specific to a particular field might be useful more generally as a metaphor.) 

People vary in how much they can taste bitter things. If you go around giving people the chemical Phenylthiocarbamide (PTC), which you shouldn't do, because it is toxic, you'll find that some people taste it as a strongly bitter while others can't taste it at all. Same with 6-n-propylthiouracil (PROP). While these aren't common in food, they're very similar to chemicals that are in a lot of foods, so you might think that how much you can taste PTC or PROP might influence what foods you like.

We can test this. Give people various foods that there is dispute about the bitterness of, and then compare their preferences to their sensitivity to PTC or PROP. Several studies have done this:

• Genetic Taste Markers and Food Preferences (2001, n=121) found that people who could taste PROP better were more likely to say they didn't like cruciferous vegetables (broccoli, cabbage, etc).
• Taste and food preferences as predictors of dietary practices in young women (1999, n=157) found that "sensitivity to the bitter taste of PROP was associated with reduced preferences for Brussels sprouts, cabbage, spinach and coffee beverages". But it's behind a paywall, so this is just from the abstract. The same authors in a related study, Food preferences and reported frequencies of food consumption as predictors of current diet in young women (1999, n=87) found that people who reported liking cruciferous vegetables less ate them 1/3 as often.
• Bitter taste markers explain variability in vegetable sweetness, bitterness, and intake (2006, n=110) found that people "who taste PROP as most bitter also tasted the vegetables as most bitter and least sweet." This one is also paywalled, so I've only looked at the abstract.

Vegetables like broccoli are often thought to be good for you, so shouldn't we expect to see people who taste PROP and PTC not live as long, because they're eating less of those? Ideally we would test how sensitive people are to bitterness at some youngish age, and then watch them for the next 80 years to see how long they lived. But 80 years is a long time to wait, and you're going to need a large sample because we don't expect the effect to be that big. Another option would be to measure sensitivity to bitterness, and see whether it decreased with age in the same way we would expect if the people with increased bitterness sensitivity were dying earlier. But this is going to be impractical to separate from the hypothesis that simply individual people lose some of their sense of taste over time.

Luckily, it turns out that this tasting ability is very strongly genetic. People with one variant of the gene TAS2R38 can nearly always taste PTC while people with another variant almost never can. So we can sample people at any age and get an estimate of how likely they were to have avoided vegetables for taste reasons. Are older people less likely to have the gene variant for tasting bitterness? It turns out they are. In Bitter Taste Receptor Polymorphisms and Human Aging (2012, n=941) they tested Calabrians for their bitterness gene variant, and did find that older people were less likely to have the variant for detecting bitterness:

So can we say that (a) eating vegetables will help you live longer and (b) if vegetables taste bitter to you should eat them anyway to get benefit (a)? Unfortunately it's not that clear. Vegetables aren't the only common food with these bitter compounds, so it might be something else. Other bitter-to-some foods that these non-bitter-tasters might have been eating more of include coffee, tea, grapefruit juice, soy, cigarettes (maybe), and probably other things we haven't tested. There's also the possibility that the older and younger participants in the longevity study aren't the same group of people genetically, and what they're actually capturing is population changes in Calabria. One way to test that would be to repeat the study in several different places, as we would expect population drift to be independent of sensitivity to bitterness.