Interesting article, though I notice the top featured comments claims it’s “missing essentially every piece of work done in the last FIFTEEN years.” Nonetheless it doesn’t give any reason to think that the downsides of caffeine that the article points out aren’t real.
tog
The first part of your draft article (before the long ‘Suppliers & Prices’ section) is just what I’ve been looking for—thanks. I had a moderately good experience with modafinil the first time I bought it, so may try it again, though I’m (perhaps irrationally) cautious about drugs.
(FWIW, it cost £30 for 50 Modalert pills in the UK at the time—not sure how that compares with US prices, but it looks high enough to be legit given your calculation.)
Couldn’t resist getting in a dig at those reds or blues eh?
Humanity is lost in politics—a friend rhetorically asks: “Have you ever seen a rich person feed a hungry dog?”
Yes. And don’t forget that, in global terms (even taking into account PPP), you’re probably among the rich if you live in a rich nation. Though I don’t know if you’re a fellow dog-owner.
Not to go off on a tangent, but I’d say it’s more utopian than critical of utopia—I don’t think we can require utopias to be perfect to deserve the name, and Anarres is pretty (perhaps unrealistically) good, with radical (though not complete) changes in human nature for the better.
if neither jimrandomh nor any lurkers see any obvious problems, I’ll write it up as a longer paper, with more rigorous math and better explanations
Did you ever end up writing it up? I think I’d follow more easily if you went a little slower and gave some concrete examples.
Surely a self-proving value is one where the question “Is X valuable?” is self-proving?
Are pure and measured doses safe? What about the adverse consequences of addiction?
Can you clarify the question? The other charities all have legal text on their websites saying (for example):
“80,000 Hours is part of the Centre for Effective Altruism, a charitable company limited by guarantee registered in England and Wales, number 7962181. Centre for Effective Altruism, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, Littlegate House, St Ebbes Street, Oxford OX1 1PT, UK”
It might be slightly deceptive (and thus not worth doing), but what about changing “people” to “persons”? Those who think about animal welfare more liberally would recognize “persons” as referring to both humans and non-humans, while those who are more conservative that GWWC is trying to reach will just automatically assume it means “people”.
That’d be too deceptive—people would rightly feel you’d tricked them if they got the impression all money was going to alleviate human suffering. If GWWC were to go down this route (which I don’t think it should—better for CEA to leave that to EAA), then the word ‘others’ would be more appropriate, though still a little deceptive.
Some people have indicated that they might want to restrict their donation to just one of GWWC, 80K or EAA. But earmarking often doesn’t work in the presence of unrestricted funding
I’ve been helping CEA work out how to handle earmarking; naturally we’re aware of the fungibility problem, and there is in fact a whole page on the GWWC website about it. So I can promise that we’re being careful to respect the wishes of donors who wish to earmark, while being upfront about any fungibility issues with them.
Remember that the pledge is not to give money to GWWC; it’s a pledge to give to effective charities in general.
It’s not; the whole message of GWWC is about the strong reasons we in the relatively wealthy west have to give significant portions of our income to cost-effective global poverty charities. I completely respect those who think we have even stronger reasons to donate to cost-effective charities focused on causes like animal welfare or x-risk, but GWWC is focused on global poverty (which does earn it more mainstream credibility than, say, EAA or SingInst).
Oxford; 28 years (though limited experience gained from those between ages 0 and 13); beautiful city with a lot going on intellectually, and—for ethically-inclined rationalists—home to the Centre for Effective Altruism; terrible weather, high cost of living.
Oh, and I just saw this: Oxford is best place to live, survey finds. So it’s established—close the thread.
If over time the time cost of intermediaries (additional handling and overhead costs) remains below the cost of the steps to eliminate intermediaries (the investment required to establish a 501(c)(3)) then I stand corrected.
As the person who runs the central CEA Ops division, I can promise you that it saves time and money costs, and doesn’t impose any significant such costs that I can think of. Registering as a UK charity and a 501(c)3 (and a company that can have employees, interns and an office) has taken a lot of work, and I’m glad that GWWC, 80k, Effective Animal Actisism and The Life You Can Save haven’t had to duplicate (or quadruple) that work.
PS: Despite this view, I promise it wasn’t me who downvoted you :)
I’m doing the same, using HabitRPG as the tool to do so. It turns your life into a game, where you earn gold and XP for achieving your goals, and can spend gold points on rewards you define like chocolate. It’s kinda fun, especially when ‘played’ with a group!
Great article! A couple of questions:
(1) Can you justify picking ‘the top 10% of people who got Ivy-League-equivalent educations’ an an appropriate elite a little more? How will the elite vary (in size and in nature) for particular subjects?
(2) Can you (or others) give more examples of the application of this method to particular questions? Personally, I’m especially interested in case where it’d depart from decision-relevant views held by a substantial fraction of effective altruists.
Great, thanks. The unjustified examples for (2) help.
I’m interested in how the appropriate elite would vary in size and in nature for particular subjects. For instance, I imagine I might place a little more weight on certain groups of experts in, say, economics and medical effectiveness than the top 10% of Ivy League grads would. I haven’t thought about this a great deal, so might well be being irrational in this.
Can you expand a little on how you would “try to find out what elite common sense would make of [your] information and analysis”? Is the following a good example of how to do it?
Imagine there’s an economic policy issue about which most members of the elite (say the top 10% of Ivy League grads) haven’t thought, and which they’d have no initial position on.
All I’m aware of is a theoretical economics argument for position A; I don’t know of any counters, arguments on the other side, etc.
I find as representative a sample of the elite as I can and tell them the argument.
The vast majority move rapidly to significant confidence in position A.
I adopt a similar perspective.
A related question is whether buying a home is rational at all, when compared to renting. Obviously it depends on how long you plan to live in the same place, but I’ve seen a lot of people buy and be tied down by houses even when in expectation they’d only be living in the same town for a few years. Can anyone point to a good discussion of the calculations involved here? (I imagine the end results will vary country by country—for example, by impression is that in parts of the UK, where I live, houses cost more relative to rent than in other places.)
Hi all, I’ve just started reading Less Wrong, having long seen links to it on utilitarian communities online and through philosopher friends in Oxford. If you want to know more about me you could read the ‘about me’ page on my http://www.philosofiles.com/ website, though I won’t bore you with the details here! I’m always more than happy to discuss my beliefs though, so I look forward to eventually engaging with the discussions here :)