On this note, I'm happy that in CEA's new post, they talk about building the brand of effective altruism

I understand why people shy away from/hide their identities when speaking with journalists but I think this is a mistake, largely for reasons covered in this post but I think a large part of the name brand of EA deteriorating is not just FTX but the risk-averse reaction to FTX by individuals (again, for understandable reasons) but that harms the movement in a way where the costs are externalized.

When PG refers to keeping your identity small, he means don't defend it or its characteristics for the sake of it. There's nothing wrong with being a C/C++ programmer, but realizing it's not the best for rapid development needs or memory safety. In this case, you can own being an EA/your affiliation to EA and not need to justify everything about the community. 

We had a bit of a tragedy of the commons problem because a lot of people are risk-averse and don't want to be associated with EA in case something bad happens to them but this causes the brand to lose a lot of good people you'd be happy to be associated with.

I'm a proud EA.

I think we feel this more than is the case. I think a lot of people know about it but don't have much of an opinion on it, similar to how I feel about NASCAR or something. 

I recently caught up with a friend who worked at OpenAI until very recently and he thought it was good that I was part of EA and what I did since college.

Didn't mean to imply you were, sorry if it came off that way.

Yup, I agree. But I think most people don't care as much about political outcomes as they purport to, based on their actions. I think a lot of that is social desirability bias.

I also don't think it's that clear  that Kamala is obviously the better pick or that Trump being President over Kamala is worth $1-10T of value. I like this comment about the better choice for President being non-obvious.

I agree that we should judge the actions ex ante. I also agree that (you are implying this I think) you have to start early and do good thinking in order to be effective here. 3 months before the election is too late. We had to get on this years before the election and the most effective solutions will look like getting good, sound, authentic, moderate candidates into the running or paying Biden $100mm to committ to not running.

I think if you went to say Reid Hoffman and Mark Cuban and others and said "it's going to cost $10B, $10B and we flip this election.", I think they would probably put in ~100mm (maybe less tbh) each, personally and go pretty gung-ho to get you to $10B. 

The main problem is that I just don't think you can turn money into votes through advertising past a point. I think you need to actually just pay people (which is illegal) and then you can flip votes. But for the vast majority of people, showing them more ads just does nothing. There's even some evidence that it turns people off.

I'm not going to scrutinize your calculations. I think you realize that you don't know in advance how many votes you need and where and that perhaps $1k/vote flip is on the margin and once you pick that fruit, it gets a lot harder and that you don't have good accuracy on which votes you flip (even in a model where you do get to pay $1k/vote flip, most of the time that vote flip just happens in some random unimportant state). Thus, you basically got this advantage where the math looks great due to the importance of certain states due to the electoral college but that advantage gets effectively undone because you don't get to perfectly target the states you want.

I would greatly expect that once everything is accounted for, donating EA money to politics won't be cost effective but I like that you're thinking about this and realize that it's not going to be "EA money" predominantly.

I'm fairly skeptical that more money would really have done anything. I understand that politics should get more money than almonds. But I think that would mainly be done by giving money to both sides.

As an exercise, what should Kamala have spent more money on if she had it? She had name recognition. I don't think anyone in the country was unsure about who she was. I think it's really hard to come up with things more money would have done for the Democrats. The real thing you need to do is not purchasable with money; you need to make Democrat policies work better for people. I think Ezra Klein is onto something here really.

I've written about this elsewhere, but it is far less constructive when you come at everything with a mindset where you assume malicious intent and find corroborating evidence.

Again, native English speakers sometimes make grammar/spelling mistakes. Grammar in your non-native language is harder for a variety of reasons. One thing to at least consider is that words such as "in, by, on, until" don't often translate perfectly, or kinda mean different things depending on context. I speak English native/fluently. When I speak in French or Spanish (where I'm proficient-fluent), I definitely make mistakes all the time, precisely because I am doing a lot of translating to/from English and not thinking in the language. Here's a simple example I came up with in English-Spanish

See how "in" and "by" both get translated to "en". I probably would use different phrasing than Google Translate, but it wouldn't shock me if Sinergia people are using Google Translate (or similar), frequently. It's exhausting to speak/work in your non-native language, and there are all these tiny phrasings that are difficult. Now multiply this by every row/column in the Google Sheet and every claim, etc.

It's good that you are reviewing this work, and my offer still stands to pay you for future reviews you want to do in good faith. We need far more rigor on cost-effectiveness analyses, and EA often has a culture where we are too nice to each other to call things out and get defensive about object-level criticism. I think they have gotten better in the last couple of years, but I was fairly unhappy with ACE's cost-effectiveness methods a few years ago, and so I want their work reviewed, checked, and questioned, and perhaps even re-done. But for criticism to be taken well and without defensiveness, you can't come out fully on the offensive, accuse people of lying and malicious intent everywhere.

ACE clearly made a mistake by leaving column W published in the public view. I'm sure they would actually give you everything unredacted if you asked and were nice about it! But you need to get out of the mindset of doing a charity "takedown" as opposed to a charity review. It wouldn't surprise me if many organizations are slightly optimistic in taking credit for things or are a bit generous in their counting. Correcting this is great. It gives us better info/data from which to make decisions. If it does turn out that some charities are way off the mark, I'm sure some will be a bit defensive but others will actually want to switch their work. 

Here is an example of @Vasco Grilo🔸 doing a pretty good critique of Sinergia that they should be trying to focus on their cage-free campaigning as opposed to meal replacement. That is extremely useful. It's particularly useful because it's something that @Carolina Galvani - Sinergia Animal can engage with, doesn't assume Sinergia is lying, and additional reasons can then be given for why Sinergia might still want to do something etc.

I'm a bit confused what you are arguing for. Do you want the wealthy to have even more influence on our politics? Is this just a supposition that Kamala Harris would have been better than Trump (I agree) and thus it would have been good for billionaires to donate for this reason?

I should have made my response clearer. I am suggesting a few things.

1. It seems that on a relative basis, billionaires are on average, about as or more charitable than EAs. I think this is a sign that EAs should be far more charitable.
2. I think the fact that even EAs don't seem to donate very much suggests that it actually is very hard to get people to donate significant percentages of their income/wealth.
3. I think it's going to be quite hard to convince others (in this case, billionaires) that they should be donating significant sums of their income/wealth when we don't. It's just too easy to dismiss people as hypocrites at first glance or that we don't really believe it.

I think I just don't see that most EAs are taking very low salaries. Many (most?) make comparable salaries to what they would make in industry, some more, some less. I don't think EA salaries are particularly low in general.

I think you are usually an insightful, reasonable, and truthful commenter on the forum and off the forum. That said, I think there are a few errors and important facts on this topic that are omitted.

This is the Gini coefficient (measurement of inequality) in the United States over the last 20 years (the country I expect you are talking about).

Here it is for several more countries where EAs predominantly live. 

I don't know why it "seems" like inequality is getting worse. I think a lot of that has to do with news coverage and such. But Gini coefficients are flat in most of the world over this time and going down (towards less inequality) in a few countries.

With respect to donations, I again want to point out that EAs themselves don't donate very much money. This link is from 2019, I don't have more recent data, but I expect that the trend has gone down significantly since then (i also think there is a good chance that these surveys overestimate donations) as there has been less emphasis on earning to give in the community. I understand that the majority of EAs aren't billionaires, but they do often earn a significant amount of money, definitely enough to put them in the global top 5% and often the top 1%. The median EA donates something like 3%. These are people who self-identify as charitable.

On the power of the ultra-wealthy, I expect some of this is coming from Elon Musk's power, but keep in mind that the majority of billionaires supported the candidate that lost the election. I'm not sure which measure would have billionaires being more powerful than previous years (unless of course that there are more of them since the world is getting richer + inflation).