Small startup nonprofits, such as those from Charity Entrepreneurship, face the tradeoff between staying smaller, and thus by default more cost-effective per unit of money, and grow, and accept diminishing returns but larger impact. The second seems worth doing because it unlocks more impact as a whole. The first order analysis: Producing impact at scale is worth the reduction in…
Our hero, Arjuna, finds himself in a position of either fighting his cousins, who have gone to war against him, or losing his kingdom and abandoning his duty as a warrior. As he surveys the battlefield, he turns to Krishna, who is taking the form of his charioteer, and inquires about how to make this decision and the nature of the good life. The answer is a recipe: realize that pursuing happiness…
American’s base needs are met . American culture, for the rich Americans I get along with, is incredibly messed up, where people’s base needs are met (something historically uncommon), so they focus on the higher needs (acceptance, self-actualization, impact, status). This is historically unusual . This state of affairs is historically uncommon. GDP per capita was lower than 10K even in the…
People come to askaforecaster.com , and magic ball tells us all. Because they are willing to pay for an answer, questions tend to be interesting, and I’ve found it very meaningful to answer them. The below has been lightly edited for anonymity and published with the clients' permission. For $150: Will AI eat my product design job? Dear forecaster, Current AI tools are augmenting work for…
Frameworks that try to predict reality can fail when they miss crucial details. Frameworks about AI have each failed in turn. For instance: Future Shock , Alvin Toffler, 1970: Higher adaptation ability than anticipated, sometimes manifested as constantly shifting goalposts for what is “AGI”. The Singularity is Near , Ray Kurzweil, 2005: We aren’t seeing a discrete singularity,…
A dollar is a promise. A promise that you will be able to acquire goods and services from Americans. But it is not a specific promise for specific goods, but a vague promise. It is however a promise with momentum, and the rest of the world has coordinated around the power of the dollar for trade. This is powerful insofar as dollar-denominated markets outcompete other coordination methods. Up to…
The share of the surface of the Earth which is very urban turns out to be a recurring question when estimating various catastrophic risks, like asteroids or volcanoes. Once we estimate the frequency of such events, we want to estimate the chance that they’d hit an urban area. There is some pre-existing literature on the topic, but I thought that making my own estimate would be quicker and…
The baserate for all companies The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics shares data on the survivorship rates of a all companies. Around 30-35% die before the third year, and around 50% by the fifth year, with surprising regularity. Of all 4.66M companies founded in the year 2000, 2.7M remain, or 18.2%. This seems like a good starting point, or baserate. The BLS also shares data disaggregated by…
A slightly abstruse tax issue affecting non-US contractors for US organizations is that sometimes such organizations ask for a W-8BEN form, but that form asks you to claim tax treaty benefits. What should you do if you live in a country which doesn’t have such a tax treaty, or are digital nomad, and are not a US citizen? What is the original purpose of form W8-BEN? What are the laws pertaining…
Here is a simple model of the US electoral college. It aims to be conceptually simple and replicatable. It incorporates data from state-specific polls, and otherwise defaults to the state’s electoral history baserate. Other projects, like 538 , Nate Silver’s substack or Gelman’s model are to this project as a sportscar is to a walking stick. They are much more sophisticated, and…
1. I want to better understand in order to better decide As a counterbalance to the rosier and more philosophical perspective that Effective Altruism (EA) likes to present of itself , I describe some unflattering aspects of EA. These are based on my own experiences with it, and my own disillusionments 1 . If people getting into EA 2 have a better idea of what they are getting into, and decide to…
Consider the number of people you know who share your birthday. This seems an unbiased estimate of the number of people who, if they had been born the same day of the year as you, you’d know—just multiply by 365. That estimate itself is an estimate of how many people one knows at a somewhat non-superficial level of familiarity. I asked my Twitter followers that question, and this is what…
Intro EA was born out of a very specific cultural milieu, and holds a very specific yet historically contingent shape. So what if instead EA had been… Effective Altruism Distributed Day-trading the crypto to liberate the animals:
AI safety forecasting questions tl;dr : This document contains a list of forecasting questions, commissioned by Open Philanthropy as part of its aim to have more accurate models of future AI progress. Many of these questions are more classic forecasting questions, others have the same shape but are unresolvable, still others look more like research projects or like suggestions of data gathering…
Auftragstaktik is a method of command and delegation where the commander gives subordinates a clearly-defined objective, high-level details, and the tools needed to accomplish their objective. The subordinates have clear operational freedom, which leaves command to focus on architecting strategic decisions. It has an interesting historical and semi-mythical background. After Napoleon outclassed…
Introduction In recent years there have been various attempts at using forecasting to discern the shape of the future development of artificial intelligence, like the AI progress Metaculus tournament , the Forecasting Research Institute’s existential risk forecasting tournament/experiment , Samotsvety forecasts on the topic of AI progress and dangers, or various questions osn INFER on…
Epistemic status : This post is blunt. Please see the extended disclaimer about negative feedback here . Consider not reading it if you work on the EA forum and don’t have thick skin. tl;dr : Once, the EA forum was a lean, mean machine. But it has become more bloated over time, and I don’t like it. Separately, I don’t think it’s worth the roughly $2M/year 1 it costs,…
The Unix utility wc counts words. You can make simple, non-POSIX compatible version of it that solely counts words in 159 words and 42 lines of C . Or you can be like GNU and take 3615 words and 1034 lines to do something more complex. Desiderata Simple: Just count words as delimited by spaces, tabs, newlines. Allow: reading files, piping to the utility, and reading from stdin—concluded by…
Manifund is a new effort to improve, speed up and decentralize funding mechanisms in the broader Effective Altruism community, by some of the same people previously responsible for Manifold . Due to Manifold’s policy of making a bunch of their internal documents public, you can see their application to Open Philanthropy here (also a markdown backup here ). Here is my perspective on this:…
tl;dr : Incorporate keeping track of accuracy into X 1 . This contributes to the goal of making X the chief source of information, and strengthens humanity by providing better epistemic incentives and better mechanisms to separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of getting at the truth together. Why do this? Because it can be done
Here is a list of internet services that I make freely available to friends and allies, broadly defined—if you are reading this, you qualify. These are ordered roughly in order of usefulness. search.nunosempere.com search.nunosempere.com is an instance of Whoogle . It presents Google results as they were and as they should have been: without clutter and without advertisements. Readers are welcome…
squiggle.c is a self-contained C99 library that provides functions for simple Monte Carlo estimation, based on Squiggle . Below is a copy of the project’s README, the original, always-up-to-date version of which can be found here Why C? Because it is fast Because I enjoy it Because C is honest
Cover for Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger , by Daft Punk In The American Empire has Alzheimer’s , we saw how the US had repeatedly been rebuffing forecasting-style feedback loops that could have prevented their military and policy failures. In A Critical Review of Open Philanthropy’s Bet On Criminal Justice Reform , we saw how Open Philanthropy, a large foundation, spent and additional…
For the last few years, while I was employed at the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute, a focus of my work has been on estimating impact, and on doing so in a more hardcore way, and for more speculative domains, than the Effective Altruism community was previously doing. Alas, the FTX Future Fund, which was using some of our tools, no longer exists. Open Philanthropy was another foundation…
There is an interesting thing around consent and betting: Clueless people can’t give fully informed consent around taking some bets I offer, because if they were fully informed, they wouldn’t make the bet, because they would know that I’m a few levels above them in terms of calibration and forecast accuracy. But on the other hand, they can only acquire the “fully…
Consider the following relationship:
tl;dr: I present relative estimates for animal suffering and 2022 top Animal Charity Evaluators (ACE) charities. I am doing this to showcase a new tool from the Quantified Uncertainty Research Institute (QURI) and to present an alternative to ACE’s current rubric-based approach. Introduction and goals At QURI, we’re experimenting with using relative values to estimate the worth of…
Status: Simple point worth writting up clearly. Motivating example You are a dinosaur astronomer about to encounter a sequence of big and small meteorites. If you see a big meteorite, you and your whole kin die. So far you have seen n small meteorites. What is your best guess as to the probability that you will next see a big meteorite? In this example, there is an anthropic effect going on . Your…
We want to forecast the arrival of human-level AI systems. This is a complicated task, and previous attempts have been kind of mediocre. So this paper proposes a new approach. The approach has some key assumptions. And then it needs some auxiliary hypotheses and concrete estimates flesh out those key assumptions. Its key assumptions are: That a sufficient condition for reaching human-level…
Summary I consider a simple version of “worldview diversification”: allocating a set amount of money per cause area per year. I explain in probably too much detail how that setup leads to inconsistent relative values from year to year and from cause area to cause area. This implies that there might be Pareto improvements, i.e., moves that you could make that will result in strictly…
About forum.nunosempere.com is a frontend for the Effective Altruism Forum . It aims to present EA Forum posts in a way which I personally find soothing. It achieves that that goal at the cost of pretty restricted functionality—like not having a frontpage, or not being able to make or upvote comments and posts. Usage Instead of having a frontpage, this frontend merely has an endpoint:
Do you want to bring up something to me or to the kinds of people who are likely to read this post? Or do you want to just say hi? This is the post to do it. Why am I doing this? Well, the EA Forum was my preferred forum for discussion for a long time. But in recent times it has become more censorious. Specifically, it has a moderation policy that I don’t like: moderators have banned people…