I work for Open Philanthropy. I spent 2019-2021 at the Centre for Effective Altruism, where I ran the EA Forum. I’m also a semi-professional gamer and streamer who placed second at the 2020 Magic: the Gathering world championship (“Grand Finals”).
aarongertler(Aaron Gertler)
Karma: 636
One Study, Many Results (Matt Clancy)
Done! The survey has been a progressively smoother experience each of the past three years. And it’s nice to have a time to think about the past month’s habits in a structured way during the school year.
“Throughout the day, Stargirl had been dropping money. She was the Johnny Appleseed of loose change: a penny here, a nickel there. Tossed to the sidewalk, laid on a shelf or bench. Even quarters.
“I hate change,” she said. “It’s so . . . jangly.”
“Do you realize how much you must throw away in a year?” I said.
“Did you ever see a little kid’s face when he spots a penny on a sidewalk?”
Jerry Spinelli, Stargirl
EA Forum Creative Writing Contest: $10,000 in prizes for good stories
I gave $50, and plan to give substantially more within a year of graduation. That was one hell of a “big picture” section, Anna.
“I refuse to answer that question on the grounds that I don’t know the answer.”
― Douglas Adams
Who are your favorite “hidden rationalists”?
So as to keep the quote on its own, my commentary:
This passage (read at around age 10) may have been my first exposure to an EA mindset, and I think that “things you don’t value much anymore can still provide great utility for other people” is a powerful lesson in general.
Nearly two years in the pandemic the core EA organizations still seem to show no sign of caring that they didn’t prevent it despite their mission including fighting biorisks.
Which core organizations are you referring to, and which signs are you looking for?
This has been discussed to some extent on the Forum, particularly in this thread, where multiple orgs were explicitly criticized. (I want to see a lot more discussions like these than actually exist, but I would say the same thing about many other topics — EA just isn’t very big and most people there, as anywhere, don’t like writing things in public. I expect that many similar discussions happened within expert circles and didn’t appear on the Forum.)
I worked at CEA until recently, and while our mission isn’t especially biorisk-centric (we affect EA bio work in indirect ways on multi-year timescales), our executive director insisted that we should include a mention in the opening talk of the EA Picnic that EA clearly fell short of where it should have been on COVID. It’s not much, but I think it reflects a broader consensus that we could have done better and didn’t.
That said, the implication that EA not preventing the pandemic is a problem for EA seems reasonable only in a very loose sense (better things were possible, as they always are). Open Phil invested less than $100 million into all of its biosecurity grants put together prior to February 2020, and that’s over a five-year period. That this funding (and direct work from a few dozen people, if that) failed to prevent COVID seems very unsurprising, and hard to learn from.
Is there a path you have in mind whereby Open Phil (or anyone else in EA) could have spent that kind of money in a way that would likely have prevented the pandemic, given the information that was available to the relevant parties in the years 2015-2019?
Doing so would require asking uncomfortable questions and accepting uncomfortable truths and there seems to be no willingness to do so.
I find this kind of comment really unhelpful, especially in the context of LessWrong being a site about explaining your reasoning and models.
What are the uncomfortable questions and truths you are talking about? If you don’t even explain what you mean, it seems impossible to verify your claim that no one was asking/accepting these “truths”, or even whether they were truths at all.
Buying Debt as Effective Altruism?
Teacher: So if you could live to be any age you like, what would it be?
Boy 2: Infinity.
Teacher: Infinity, you would live for ever? Why would you like to live for ever?
Boy 2: Because you just know a lot of people and make lots of new friends because you could travel to lots of countries and everything and meet loads of new animals and everything.
--Until (documentary)
[Question] What are good ways of convincing someone to rethink an impossible dream?
Tom Chivers, author of “The AI Does Not Hate You”, is running an AMA on the EA Forum
I don’t think I’ve seen this point made in the discussion so far, so I’ll note it here: Anonymous downvotes (without explanation) are frustrating, and I suspect that anonymous negative reacts would be even worse. It’s one thing if someone downvotes a post I thought was great with no explanation—trolls exist, maybe they just disagreed, whatever, nothing I can do but ignore it. If they leave an “unclear” react, I can’t ignore that nearly as easily—wait, which point was unclear? What are other people potentially missing that I meant to convey? Come back, anon!
(This doesn’t overshadow the value of reacts, which I think would be positive on the whole, but I’d love to see Slashdot-style encouragement for people to share their reasoning.)
The growth of lots and lots of outlets for more “unofficial” or “raw” self-expression — blogs, yes, but before that cable TV and satellite radio, and long before that, the culture of “journalism” in 18th century America where every guy with a printing press could publish a “newspaper” full of opinions and scurrilous insults — tends to go along with more rudeness, more cursing, more sexual explicitness, more political extremism in all directions, more “trashy” or “lowest common denominator” media, more misinformation and “dumbing down”, but also some innovative/intellectual “niche” media.
Chaos is a centrifugal force; it increases the chance of any unexpected outcome. Good things, bad things, existential threats, brilliant ideas, and a lot of weird, gross, and disturbing stuff.
The idea of an “anti-chaos elite” sounds fairly accurate to me, and it shows up a lot in the work of Thaddeus Russell, who wrote a book about American elites’ history of stamping out rude/chaotic behavior and runs a podcast where he interviews a wide range of people on the fringes of polite society (including libertarians, sex workers, anarchists, and weird people with no particular political affiliation). It’s not perfect from an epistemic standpoint, but it’s still worth a listen from anyone interested in this topic.
Rational Evangelism
Cool response! Upvoted. But when I saw the comic, I read it as:
“Hey! Certain things are pretty scary and seem to be beyond our human abilities to deal with! But in the face of fear, we should size things up and take action, large-scale action if need be.” In other words, a metaphor for death. (But I’ve been seeing many things as metaphors for death lately, so your mileage may vary.)
The “Yahweh wants it this way” conclusion is interesting, but then again: If God had to put Hell literally underground, he seems like more a Philip Pullman-ish “mortal god” than an all-powerful superbeing, since he works on the same material plane as us, more or less. (Imagine, for example, what the Devil would be in a literal underground hell. Invincible monster? Probably nothing a few nukes couldn’t deal with.) Or perhaps they found the door to Hades and they’ll get to face off against a (very beatable) Greek pantheon.
Either way: Better to wage war on Hell than let it sit there. I don’t trust any superbeing not to send me there, however pure a life I lead (even if we’re just thinking about Christianity vs. Islam, I seem to have only half a chance at Heaven).
Expressed in pictures rather than words, but a great example of how to respond to humanity-threatening calamities:
http://www.kiwisbybeat.com/minus37.html?Bonjour
Sidenote: Almost every Minus comic is wonderful, and there aren’t that many of them (you can read the whole series in an hour).
“The story of Japanese railways during the earthquake and tsunami is the story of an unceasing drumbeat of everything going right [...] The overwhelming response of Japanese engineering to the challenge posed by an earthquake larger than any in the last century was to function exactly as designed. Millions of people are alive right now because the system worked and the system worked and the system worked.
That this happened was, I say with no hint of exaggeration, one of the triumphs of human civilization. Every engineer in this country should be walking a little taller this week. We can’t say that too loudly, because it would be inappropriate with folks still missing and many families in mourning, but it doesn’t make it any less true.”
--Patrick McKenzie, “Some Perspective on the Japan Earthquake”
http://www.kalzumeus.com/2011/03/13/some-perspective-on-the-japan-earthquake
(Disaster is not inevitable.)