31–40 of 220 posts
Sign me up for some scientific rigor in all policy work, journalism. State hypothesis, compare predictions to reality, show your work, cite your sources, peer review. The "replication crisis" touches everything. What I like to call "governance technology". We live in exciting times. I'm irrationally optimistic. Eager to see what happens next.
The part where we don't publish our failures is a huge failing.
Sign me up for some scientific rigor in all policy work, journalism. State hypothesis, compare predictions to reality, show your work, cite your sources, peer review. The "replication crisis" touches everything. What I like to call "governance technology". We live in exciting times. I'm irrationally optimistic. Eager to see what happens next.
And publish your failures. The part where we don't publish our failures is a huge failing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Medical Research saves a lot of lives over time. A drug that saves 1,000 lives per year worldwide at the cost of 1 billion dollars seems expensive. But that's 1 million lives over the next 100 years for 10,000$ each and we would still know how to make that drug in 100 years. Dropping that to 1,000$ per life over ~1000 years. And if you consider 1 billion per 1 thousand lives/year then cancers's 8.2 million deaths/yea…
While that's true something like $10,000 would at best accelerate medical research a bit, ultimately it will only save those people for whom medical research would have otherwise been too late. It's not entirely clear what this figure would be, but with billions spend each year it's probably not several per $10,000.
Of course, that's also not often a choice I (have to) make. I've a set amount of donations to a few regular charities, whereas a situation as above would "count" towards my regular daily expenses rather than charitable givings.
It's probably also related to always being able to do more. Yes, maybe giving €x to one of the Givewell organisations is more effective than giving it to Make-A-Wish, but often it's not a game of either-or. I'm sure a lot of people donate to Make-A-Wish because they encounter it and sympathise with it, rather than spending effort looking for the most efficient way to spend , so it's not even a question of effective charity vs. MAW, but MAW vs. sitting there in your savings account.
> Not all of this money was given with the intention of maximising human welfare. Take, for instance, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which helps children stricken with life-threatening illnesses, by granting “wishes”, such as meeting celebrities or visiting theme parks. The typical wish costs the foundation around $10,000 to fulfil—heartwarming for the recipient but of little help in improving health generally. This pre…
I do often see people injecting themselves into discussions of EA once they get defensive about their charity choices.
The people who seem to be judgmental are those who dislike how EA advocates choose to operate.
> Not all of this money was given with the intention of maximising human welfare. Take, for instance, the Make-A-Wish Foundation, which helps children stricken with life-threatening illnesses, by granting “wishes”, such as meeting celebrities or visiting theme parks. The typical wish costs the foundation around $10,000 to fulfil—heartwarming for the recipient but of little help in improving health generally. This pre…
The Make-A-Wish Foundation is terrible. It is impossible to defend it by claiming it does a good job. So instead people fall back on "gosh you're mean" and "stop shaming me!" and "everything's like, totally relative, dude..." Seems you've chosen a combination of the second two.
Notice the contradictions in your comment. Effective altruists "value things differently" than you do. They care about efficiency and objectivity. Yet you're criticizing them for it! You can't have it both ways. Either it's wrong to criticize "people who value things differently," in which case it's immoral for you to criticize effective altruists for their values, or it's fine, in which case you have no reason to criticize them.
I've never met a genuine moral relativist (at least as most people use that term). I've met lots of people who claim all values are subjective, but never one who actually acts like it. They'll trot out that argument to escape from a tricky spot, but within five minutes they'll be right back to talking about objective morality.
I, for one, have no real problem with the Make-A-Wish Foundation. It just isn't a charity. It's an expensive luxury brand of peace of mind.
I don't think the one paragraph in this article where this is mentioned does enough to emphasize this part of the community. Many members of effective altruism use it as a front to recruit people into their belief system, which is centered around devotion to / fear of future AIs that exist solely as thought experiments. And while their leaders don't necessarily explicitly endorse it, the communities they foster tend to also be fairly right wing / race realist / misoginistic / bigoted.
Many of the people in the rationalist and effective altruist community believe that if they don't help create AI any future AIs will create a hell and punish them in it. Seriously. That is a serious belief.
Check out more: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Effective_altruism
http://benjaminrosshoffman.com/effective-altruism-is-self-re...
[1] http://slatestarcodex.com/2018/03/26/book-review-twelve-rule...
[2] https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3wYTFWY3LKQCnAptN/torture-vs...
[3] https://twitter.com/robinhanson/status/989535565895864320?la...
That, after working at a investment firm and having a BA in religion.
Not sure that’s the skills and salary I would trust the use of the word « reason » and « science » with. Having a 200k salary in San Francisco definitely skews your vision of the world.
I for one, will never trust the rich (Especially when it is clear when they pay people to promote their deeds and paint them an angel). I think what ever they do, they do it to gather more wealth (Even if it is not apparent for the common man). For an example, see how gates foundation tried to operate in India [1]. [1] http://jacob.puliyel.com/paper.php?id=370
The wealthy are wealthy generally because they look to make sustainable models where the goal is to avoid simply throwing resources into a pit just because it feels good to help. Doing that bankrupts everyone - consider a broader analysis before throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Give a man a fish and he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he'll eat for life.