BM

Benjamin M.

120 karmaJoined Pursuing an undergraduate degree

Bio

Here to talk about phytomining for now.

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I'll try to write a longer comment later, but right now I'm uncertain but lean towards global health because of some combination of the following:
1. I suspect negative lives are either rare or nonexistent, which makes it harder to avoid logic-of-the-larder-type arguments

2. I'm more uncertain about this, but I lean towards non-hedonic forms of consequentialism (RP parliament tool confirms that this generally lowers returns to animals)

3. Mostly based on the above, I think many moral weights for animals are too high

I'm also not sure if the 100 million would go to my preferred animal welfare causes or the EA community's preferred animal welfare causes or maybe the average person's preferred animal welfare causes. This matters less for my guesses about the impact of health and development funding.

Both my state senator and my state representative have responded to say that they'll take a look at it. It's non-commital, but it still shows how easy it is to contact these people.

Do you like SB 1047, the California AI bill? Do you live outside the state of California? If you answered "yes" to both these questions, you can e-mail your state legislators and urge them to adopt a similar bill for your state. I've done this and am currently awaiting a response; it really wasn't that difficult. All it takes is a few links to good news articles or opinions about the bill and a paragraph or two summarizing what it does and why you care about it. You don't have to be an expert on every provision of the bill, nor do you have to have a group of people backing you. It's not nothing, but at least for me it was a lot easier than it sounded like it would be. I'll keep y'all updated on if I get a response.

I'm a bit confused about how you get that children that just had severe malaria cases are a good proxy for lives saved with seasonal malaria chloroprevention.

  1. Your page on SMC says that it works by reducing the number of malaria cases, and consequently reducing the number of deaths, rather than by making malaria cases milder.
  2. Thus we'd expect that, for a child whose life was saved with SMC, the impact of receent malaria cases on their health would be nonexistent.
  3. But this is implying that they have recently had a severe malaria case, which seems like it wouldn't be true.

Am I misinterpreting something either here or on the SMC page? Or is it really being used as a proxy for sickliness in general? In that case, why are you only looking at estimates from children who suffered severe malaria cases, and not ones with other negative health events?

If I wrote this it would probably mostly be links/summaries/categorization of other people's arguments against funding forecasting, plus maybe a few reasons of my own. 

I want somebody to flesh out some of the negative comments on Open Philanthropy's announcement about funding forecasting into an actual post.

I don't have a background in forecasting or any insider knowledge of EA community dynamics, so I'm the wrong person to write this post but I might if nobody steps forward to claim it.

If you're willing to consider literature, The Glass Bead Game by Hermann Hesse is the book that led me to EA ways of thinking, and also the best book, in my opinion, that I have ever read.

This looks very interesting!

One note: Friends Peace Teams has also been producing ceramic water filters, formerly in Indonesia and more recently in the Philippines, I believe. Unfortunately it's not well documented on their website (I only found out about it through a talk that I went to). At that talk one of their members implied that they thought that they had a better production method based on training local people to make the filters using local materials in some way and then having them train others; I'm not really sure how this differs from other locally-produced water filter manufacturers but they implied that it was.

Link:

https://friendspeaceteams.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/Spring-2010.pdf

Alma "Kins" Aparece was the person who gave most of the talk and, if I remember correctly, helped facilitate the water filter making.

They very much don't fulfill the idea of a charity focusing on one intervention (or maybe a few interventions), however; they do a wide variety of programs, most of which are focused on mediation and interpersonal training rather than clean water/other more tangible goods.

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