they have other things to do with their workday than write a correction to a comment on the Forum or LessWrong, get it checked by their org’s communications staff, and then follow whatever discussion comes from it.

I think anonymous accounts can help a bit with this. I would encourage people to make an anonymous account if they feel like it would help them quickly share useful information and not have to follow the discussion (while keeping in mind that no account is truly anonymous, and it's likely that committed people can easily deanonymize it)

I think the problem is that I just don't have a grand vision of the future I am trying to contribute to.

For what it's worth, I'm skeptical of approaches that try to design the perfect future from first principles and make it happen. I'm much more optimistic about marginal improvements that try to mitigate specific problems (e.g. eradicating smallpox didn't cure all illness.)

How much we can help doesn't depend on how awful or how great the world is, we can save the drowning child whether there's a billion more that are drowning or a billion more that are thriving. To the drowning child the drowning is just as real, as is our opportunity to help.

If you feel emotionally down and unable to complete projects, I would encourage to try things that work on priors (therapy, exercise, diet, sleep, making sure you have healthy relationships) instead of "EA specific" things.

There are plenty of lives we can help no matter who won the US election and whether factory farming keeps getting worse, their lives are worth it to them, no matter what the future will be.

I haven't read the whole report and I don't know anything about development economics, so I might be misinterpreting it, but I was really surprised by:

1. If I read this table correctly, GiveWell estimates there's only a 50% chance that they'll make a >=40% adjustment to GiveDirectly's main program estimated cost-effectiveness, right after making a 330% adjustment and with many uncertainties still unresolved

   

2. Looking at this table and this graph, it seems that GiveDirectly's program has had increasing marginal cost-effectiveness, instead of diminishing returns, by expanding to Malawi, Rwanda and Mozambique. This is another update against https://www.givedirectly.org/dont-wait/ 

   

   

3. The 46% reduction in all-cause under 5 mortality seems absurdly high, even the 23% that GiveWell uses after discounting it is way higher than I would have ever thought, and has extremely depressing implications.
   

Then I'm sure he has stuff in common with Mugwump as well (and with you, me, and Thorstad)

Do you mean Bernie Sanders, Peter Thiel, or "Anonymous Mugwump"? I can't think of an ideological leaning these three have in common, but I don't know much about Mugwump

I'll let readers decide, just adding some reactions at the time for more context:

Honest question, have you read the linked post?

- Build Trump’s wall, because it’s a meaningless symbol that will change nothing, but it’ll make Republicans like me, and it will make Democrats focus all their energy on criticizing that instead of anything substantive I do.

Maybe absurdist humor is not the right description, but it's very clearly not meant to be a serious post.

I do, reading Thorstad I thought Alexander

1. Was ignoring that Zuckerberg is indeed using nice pictures to improve his reputation.
2. Was seriously endorsing Murray for welfare czar.

Reading the original I see that neither is true: the Murray pick was absurdist humor, and the Zuckerberg thing was that good things are good even if Zuckerberg does them.

If some of the quotes from Scott Alexander seem particularly poorly reasoned, I would encourage readers to click through the original source. Some examples:

From Thorstad:

In late 2022, following continued reporting on scandals within the effective altruism movement, Alexander wrote an essay entitled “If the media reported on other movements like it does effective altruism.” Alexander suggested that a variety of ridiculous results would follow, for example:

Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation.

Original quote:

Mark Zuckerberg is a good father and his children love him very much. Obviously this can only be because he’s using his photogenic happy family to “whitewash” his reputation and distract from Facebook’s complicity in spreading misinformation. We need to make it harder for people to be nice to their children, so that the masses don’t keep falling for this ploy.

From Thorstad:

Scott Alexander was once asked whom he would name to various high positions in the US government if Alexander were the president of the United States. A number of Alexander’s picks are troubling, but most to the point, Alexander says that he would appoint Charles Murray as welfare czar. (After listing a few more picks, including Stephen Hsu, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk, Alexander says that: “Everything else can be filled by randomly selected black women so that I can brag about how diverse I am.“)

Original quote:

Anonymous asked:

You wake up on the morning on the 20th of January to find that you are now Donald Trump, on the day of your inauguration as president. (Investigation reveals there is another you still practising medicine in Michigan as normal fwiw.) As president, what do you do with the powers available to you? How do Congress, the media, and the public respond? How do you respond back?

 

My cabinet/related picks:

Attorney General: Preet Bharara
Commerce: Peter Thiel
Defense: James Mattis
State: Tulsi Gabbard
Housing & Urban Development: Matt Yglesias
Homeland Security: Anonymous Mugwump
Health & Human Services: Julia Wise
Transportation/Energy: Elon Musk
Treasury: Satoshi Nakamoto
Education: Eva Moskowitz
Veterans Affairs: David Petraeus
Agriculture: Buck Shlegeris
Labor: Bernie Sanders

White House Chief Of Staff: Miranda Dixon-Luinenburg
Head of NIH: Stephen Hsu
Surgeon General: Dr. Chris Ballas
Head of FDA: Alex Tabarrok
Welfare Czar: Charles Murray
Chair of Federal Reserve: Scott Sumner
Budget Director: Holden Karnofsky
Head of CIA: Philip Tetlock

Everything else can be filled by randomly selected black women so that I can brag about how diverse I am.

First order of business: in addition to being my Secretary of Labor, Bernie Sanders is now vice president. I don’t care what he does with the position, it’s just so that the Republican Congress knows that if they impeach me, they’re getting a pacifist Jewish socialist as the leader of the free-world.

[...]

There are many (most?) EAs who do not have a direct high-impact career or do a lot of high-impact volunteering. So roughly the other way of having impact is earning to give, and if people can give 10%, I think that should qualify.

I don't understand the reasoning behind this. The goal shouldn't be to allow everyone to "have an impact", and people can definitely "have an impact" by donating 10%, regardless of whether it counts as earning to give.