SummaryQuadratic funding (QF) is a mechanism that has gained attention as a potential way to improve resource allocation in a number of philanthropic decision situations. In this post, I explain how the mechanism works, discuss some of its drawbacks, and discuss how these drawbacks relate to several proposed use cases. I argue that its drawbacks severely limit the practical applicability of the mechanism, and that QF will generally not be an attractive option for philanthropic applications.IntroductionQuadratic funding is a mechanism for providing public goods which was first proposed by Buterin, Hitzig and Weil (2019) (henceforth BHW). It is related to (but different from) quadratic voting, and has attracted attention in the philanthropic space in the past few years. For example, Gitcoin and DoraHacks are two of the main platforms that currently use QF for funding software development, with Gitcoin alone distributing over $50 million using this mechanism. WeTrust has used QF for matching donations. The effective altruism (EA) community in particular has also demonstrated interest in the mechanism. Two of its proponents were guests on the 80,000 Hours podcast (Vitalik Buterin and Glen Weyl), the paper proposing the mechanism has been cited in the GPI research agenda, and a number of EA Forum posts discuss it. One project proposal suggested [...]

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First published:

July 4th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kHDjtqSiSohZAQyjG/some-thoughts-on-quadratic-funding

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Crossposted from my blog.  The horror of fish farmingOne of my professors in college taught a class about effective altruism—a social movement about doing good effectively. Whenever he was talking about the scale of animal suffering, all the statistics he talked about were about the suffering of non-fish. It became a running joke—friends and I would make jokes like the following: “a gunman robs a bank, kills over 4 non-fish” or “one (non-fish) death is a tragedy, a million fish deaths are a statistic.” But this professor, despite explicitly ignoring fish whenever he talked about a problem, was nonetheless more pro-fish than almost all people. Because no one cares about fish—at all.I remember when I was young, my grandmother would take me and my brother fishing. This was seen as a totally innocuous, fun way to spend a weekend. The general attitude towards fishing is almost exactly opposite to the attitude towards, for example, hunting: liberal parents in blue states are not happy letting their children hunt land creatures, the way they are happy to let their children hunt fish. This is unsettling—hooking fish into the mouth to yank them out of the water so that they suffocate to death [...]

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First published:

July 26th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/kwxE7HYjRpYwSEiKb/underwater-torture-chambers-the-horror-of-fish-farming

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I collected my favorite public pieces of research on AI strategy, governance, and forecasting from 2023 so far.If you're a researcher, I encourage you to make a quick list of your favorite pieces of research, then think about what makes it good and whether you're aiming at that with your research.To illustrate things you might notice as a result of this exercise:I observe that my favorite pieces of research are mostly aimed at some of the most important questions[1]– they mostly identify a very important problem and try to answer it directly.I observe that for my favorite pieces of research, I mostly would have been very enthusiastic about a proposal to do that research– it's not like I'd have been skeptical about the topic but the research surprised me with how good its results were.[2]1. Model evaluation for extreme risks (DeepMind, Shevlane et al., May)Current approaches to building general-purpose AI systems tend to produce systems with both beneficial and harmful capabilities. Further progress in AI development could lead to capabilities that pose extreme risks, such as offensive cyber capabilities or strong manipulation skills. We explain why model evaluation is critical for addressing extreme risks. Developers must be able to identify [...]

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First published:

July 23rd, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zzyD8eTbqj7xairmZ/my-favorite-ai-governance-research-this-year-so-far

Linkpost URL:
https://blog.aiimpacts.org/p/my-favorite-ai-governance-research

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Since writing The Precipice, one of my aims has been to better understand how reducing existential risk compares with other ways of influencing the l…

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First published:

July 18th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Doa69pezbZBqrcucs/shaping-humanity-s-longterm-trajectory

Linkpost URL:
http://files.tobyord.com/shaping-humanity's-longterm-trajectory.pdf

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Since writing The Precipice, one of my aims has been to better understand how reducing existential risk compares with other ways of influencing the l…

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First published:

July 18th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Doa69pezbZBqrcucs/shaping-humanity-s-longterm-trajectory

Linkpost URL:
http://files.tobyord.com/shaping-humanity's-longterm-trajectory.pdf

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Formerly known as "Aaron's Epistemic Stories", which stops working as a title when it's on the Forum and people aren't required to read it.

What is this post?

A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes.

Context: When I worked at CEA, my colleague was working on EA Virtual Program curricula. She asked me to respond to this prompt:

"What made you start caring about having good epistemics? What made you start trying to improve your epistemics? Why?"

I wrote a meandering, stream-of-consciousness response and shared it. I assumed it would either be ignored or briefly summarized as part of a larger piece. Instead, it — went directly to the curriculum for the In-Depth Program?

That was a surprise.[1] It was a much bigger surprise when people started reaching out to tell me how [...]

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Outline:

(00:12) What is this post?

(01:20) Recovering from rejection

(07:56) What was the actual mistake, though?

(11:10) Reflection: Doing epistemics better

(16:51) Bonus story: Asking the right questions

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 3rd, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NDRBZNc2sBy5MC8Fw/recovering-from-rejection

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Formerly known as "Aaron's Epistemic Stories", which stops working as a title when it's on the Forum and people aren't required to read it.What is this post?A story about how I reacted poorly to my first few EA job rejections, and what I learned from reflecting on my mistakes.Context: When I worked at CEA, my colleague was working on EA Virtual Program curricula. She asked me to respond to this prompt:"What made you start caring about having good epistemics? What made you start trying to improve your epistemics? Why?"I wrote a meandering, stream-of-consciousness response and shared it. I assumed it would either be ignored or briefly summarized as part of a larger piece. Instead, it — went directly to the curriculum for the In-Depth Program?That was a surprise.[1] It was a much bigger surprise when people started reaching out to tell me how much it had helped them: maybe a dozen times over the last two years. From the emails alone, it seems to be the most important thing I've written.[2]So I'm sharing a lightly edited version on the Forum, in case it helps anyone else. Recovering from rejectionAfter I graduated from college, I took the most profitable job I could find, at a company in a cheap city. I wanted to save money so I could be flexible later. So far, so good.I started an EA group at the company, which kept me thinking about effective altruism on a regular basis even without my college group. It wasn’t nearly as fun to run as the college group — people who work full-time jobs don't like extra meetings, and my co-organizers kept getting other jobs and leaving. But I still felt like “part of EA”.Eventually, I decided to move on from the company. So I applied to GiveWell, got to the very last step of the application process… and got rejected.Well, I thought, I guess it makes sense that I’m not qualified for an EA job. My grades weren’t great, and I was never a big researcher in college. Time to do something else.(This is a story about a mistake. Do you see it?)I moved to San Diego and spent the next 18 months as a freelance tutor and writer, feeling generally dissatisfied with my life. My local group met rarely and far away; I had no car, I was busy with family stuff, and I became less and less engaged with EA.Through an old connection, I was introduced to a couple who ran an EA-aligned foundation and lived nearby. I ended up doing part-time operations work for them — reading papers, emailing charities with questions, and other EA-flavored stuff.This boosted my confidence and led me to think harder about my career, though I kept running into limitations. For example, GiveDirectly’s CEO wanted to hire a research assistant for his lab at UCSD, but I’d totally forgotten my old R classes and wasn’t a good candidate, despite having a great connection from my operations work. There goes maybe the best opportunity I’ll ever [...]

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First published:

July 3rd, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NDRBZNc2sBy5MC8Fw/recovering-from-rejection-my-piece-for-the-in-depth-ea

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WHY WRITE A POST ABOUT THEORIES OF CHANGE?As participants in a movement with ‘effective’ in its name, it’s easy to think of ourselves as being above falling for the most common mistakes made in the…

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 16th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9t7St3pfEEiDsQ2Tr/nailing-the-basics-theories-of-change

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On May 11, 2023, the Supreme Court of the United States upheld a 2018 California law, Proposition 12, which banned the sale of certain animal products that did not meet minimum welfare standards. Especially now that such ballot initiatives have withstood legal challenges, a relevant question we might ask is: how cost-effective were initiatives like Proposition 12 at reducing farmed animal suffering? Below is the executive summary of a report I wrote for Rethink Priorities analyzing the cost-effectiveness of not just Proposition 12, but also three other historical animal welfare ballot initiatives in the United States. In this report, I also compared the results to the cost-effectiveness of corporate campaigns. The full report is viewable here with a detailed discussion of the methodology and results. Executive SummaryKey ResultsIn this report, I estimated the impact and cost-effectiveness of four historical United States ballot initiatives that either restricted the use of common animal confinement methods (including extremely confining stalls and tethering for veal calves, extremely confining gestation crates for breeding sows, and conventional cages for egg-laying hens), set minimum per-animal space requirements, and/or mandated cage-free systems for egg-laying hens.[1] These initiatives are Arizona Proposition 204 (2006), California Proposition 2 (2008), Massachusetts Question 3 (2016), and California Proposition 12 (2018).The three metrics of impact I estimated were: The number of years of improved animal welfare produced per dollar spent passing the initiatives for three animal types (veal calves, breeding sows, and egg-laying hens);The estimated years of disabling pain-equivalent suffering[2] alleviated per dollar for veal calves, breeding sows, and egg-laying hens; and The relative years of improved hen welfare and disabling pain-equivalent suffering avoided per dollar per year of counterfactual impact compared to corporate cage-free campaigns,[3] rated using an equivalent metric. I estimated these metrics by building a Monte Carlo model in Causal that used data on state population sizes, per-capita animal product consumption, state animal populations, and campaign fundraising amounts to estimate the number of animals whose quality of life was improved over the first four years in which the ballot initiatives were in place. In addition, for egg-laying hens specifically, I used data from the Welfare Footprint Project to estimate the years of suffering alleviated by the transition away from conventional cages for the ballot initiatives that included egg-laying hens (Welfare Footprint Project). Finally, I compared the per-dollar years of improved welfare generated and suffering avoided by ballot initiatives to that accomplished by corporate campaigns, using cost-effectiveness estimates from Saulius Šimčikas, the estimated number of animals whose lives were improved, and the Welfare Footprint data.The key takeaways are:Among all species, about 5.0 years of animal life were improved per dollar spent (with a 90-percentile range between 3.9 and 6.4 years per dollar). This translates into approximately 0.10 years of suffering avoided per dollar spent on all four ballot initiatives, with a 90-percentile range from 0.05 years per dollar to 0.14 years per dollar.Helping egg-laying hens is, by far, the most impactful farmed animal welfare reform.Nearly all (about 99%) of the reductions in farmed-animal suffering by these four initiatives can be attributed to bans on battery [...]

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

June 20th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/EEMpNRJK5qqCw6zqH/a-cost-effectiveness-analysis-of-historical-farmed-animal

Linkpost URL:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1p7xqop2FlIF8Kw45za0NnJPwvUA70Mb1UzjijMRKRr8/edit?usp=sharing

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WHY WRITE A POST ABOUT THEORIES OF CHANGE?As participants in a movement with ‘effective’ in its name, it’s easy to think of ourselves as being above falling for the most common mistakes made in the…

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

July 16th, 2023

Source:

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/9t7St3pfEEiDsQ2Tr/nailing-the-basics-theories-of-change

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