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Effective altruism and the current funding situation
- jaggs 4y agoThe thing that worries me most about EA is how they consider that 2 to 4 degrees warming from climate change is not a big deal. "Bad but survivable" is how they describe it on their existential risks page. I think they're misreading the science a little. Unfortunately. I wrote to Toby Ord a while back to comment on this, and he very politely wrote back and fobbed me off with some story.
- mleonhard 4y agoGlobal warming should increase the total amount of arable land and therefore increase agricultural output. The harm comes from displacement of people from coastal cities, islands, and regions that become unsuitable for agriculture. Billions will try to move to Siberia & Canada. There will be conflict.
- mattcwilson 4y agoCan you share what it is you're looking at that makes the case for 2 to 4 degrees warming being an existential threat?
- jaggs 4y agoI will refer you to the latest IPCC summary report. https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/ https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/
- mattcwilson 4y agoRight. Are you referring to this chart of risk levels at different levels of temperature rise? https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/800-2/spm2-approval-v6a-usletter/ https://www.ipcc.ch/srccl/chapter/summary-for-policymakers/8... Asking because, while all the risks laid out are quite serious, nothing in the language of the report (that I can find) mentions anything about the planet becoming unsurvivable altogether. The language that does talk about impacted populations speaks in terms of hundreds of millions of people. For instance, section A.5.5 specifically connects number of human lives impacted under different levels of projected temperature rise. My point is: climate change is a really big problem, and we should absolutely take action on these recommendations. Using language like “existential threat” is hyperbolic and, imo, harms the cause.
- jaggs 4y agoThank you for the chart. I think that any discussion of the matter will be futile. If only because none of us - even the scientists - have enough information to make a prediction about scale, rate and impact of climate change over time. But the pattern we are seeing now indicates that things are moving faster than the climate scientists expected. I feel the word 'existential' is appropriate (and by the way that word was used by EA not me) because for hundreds of millions of people - maybe more - food and water shortages, accompanied by disease may well have such an effect. When the scientists talk about human lives impacted under different levels, we know these are best estimates, and most likely deliberately cautious. When the summary says 'Approximately 3.3 to 3.6 billion people live in contexts that are highly vulnerable to climate change (high confidence)', what does that mean? Highly vulnerable to me doesn't mean they'll just feel uncomfortable, but something more. Optimist vs pessimist perhaps? Anyway, as I said, I am not expert enough to make any kind of predictions as to the future. All I do is watch as various predictions in the Reports are reached ahead of time, and it's very worrying. Because we haven't factored in so many things (because we can't). Will runaway catastrophic impacts occur, such as a massive uptick in methane emissions after sufficient permafrost melt? What will that mean? Will the food chain on which billions rely collapse because of ocean warming and increased acidity? Will the increasing unpredictability in weather patterns make mass market farming impossible to guarantee? There's so much we don't know. This is uncharted territory really, isn't it?
- drumhead 4y agoI thought this was an article about Electronic Arts and a scoop about liquidity issues. Unfortuantely not the case...
- Arrath 4y agoI figured it was either that or Early Access and its impact on development schedules, milestones, feedback, etc.
- benbristow 4y agoEspecially as they've just lost the FIFA licence, renaming the next football (soccer) games to "EA FC" as FIFA were asking for a billion for the licence to use their name. https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/may/10/electronic-arts-ditches-fifa-ea-sports-fc https://www.theguardian.com/games/2022/may/10/electronic-art...
- mdtrooper 4y agoYes, hahaha me too. I clicked happy because I thought "yes, EA a big devil company who no release any game for Linux in their history, thanks karma". But not.
- DonHopkins 4y agoActually, EA released the source code and binary Linux version the original SimCity under GPL-3, which I ported to various Unix platforms including Linux and the OLPC. https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a275446 https://medium.com/@donhopkins/open-sourcing-simcity-58470a2... >Open Sourcing SimCity, by Chaim Gingold. Excerpt from page 289–293 of “Play Design”, a dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy in Computer Science by Chaim Gingold. Granted, EA's QA folks had never QA'ed a Linux game before, so I had to walk them through installing VMWare on Windows and gave them a Linux operating system image to test it with, but it did pass QA, and they released it in binary on the OLPC as well as in source code form. https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis https://github.com/SimHacker/micropolis Here's the contract with all the legal details: https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf https://donhopkins.com/home/olpc-ea-contract.pdf
- Recursing 4y ago@dang I would suggest editing the title, changing EA to "Effective Altruism" I'm also really curious about HN's view of Effective Altruism, and how do individuals here handle their charitable giving.
- haihaibye 4y agoI'm non-religious but many religions have a norm of charitable giving which I'm glad EA is trying to introduce for secular people. I'm not a pure utilitarian and try and get a bit of feelgood consumption out of my charity. I have an automatic monthly deduction to a cause I'm interested in, https://www.orangutan.org.au/ https://www.orangutan.org.au/ which buys up rainforests and protect orangutans in Borneo. The reason I go for this instead of "antimalarial bednets" (ie optimal human life saving) is because I have visited Borneo a few times, and think protecting great apes is important to me personally. I also kick in a few hundred bucks a year to sponsor friends doing various charity challenges.
- Smaug123 4y agoPor que no los dos? Most of my donations go to things like AMF, but I do put some money towards the causes that my ape brain prefers.
- dotsam 4y agoI personally care about rainforests and orangutans as well. But if I had a monthly donation going towards orangutans I would want to know what impact it had. How much of my money actually goes to successful habitat preservation, rather than e.g. the running costs of the organisation? Does it cost $5 million to intervene to save one orangutan, or $5,000? What does the evidence look like? If I imagined two rooms, one with a child about to die of malaria in it, and another with an orangutan in it, and you told me I could spend $7,000 dollars to save the child or $50,000 to save the orangutan, I'd be very hard pressed to save the orangutan. I think I would get the same 'feel good consumption' from more effective charitable giving, where my money went further and did more good in the world. The few thousand dollars needed to save a life from malaria would feel as good or better than tens of thousands of dollars needed to fail to save an orangutan.
- PragmaticPulp 4y agoI really hope this serves as an inflection point for the Effective Altruism crowd to pivot away from some of the weirder things they embraced in the past. I love the idea of Effective Altruism and what they're trying to accomplish, but in practice it frequently turns into funding for intellectuals to sit around and pontificate about AI risk and other things, as opposed to actually going out into the world and doing altruistic acts. Some of their previous grants are downright laughable, like spending $30K to distribute copies of rationalist Harry Potter fanfiction (Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality) despite the fact that it's freely available online. (Source: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/long-term-future-fund-april-2019-grant-decisions https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/CJJDwgyqT4gXktq6g/... Ctrl+F "Harry Potter") The EA movement has become a bit of a joke in many circles after making too many moves like this, so hopefully this serves as a wake-up call for them to start getting more practical.
- SilasX 4y agoYou’re saying that the existence of a book being freely available online means that it’s always pointless to give out physical copies? Do you make the same criticism of eg Dolly Parton’s program to give books to families for free, in cases where the copyright on the book has expired?
- elil17 4y agoReading that convinced me that giving Harry Potter fanfic to Russian math champions is a decent idea, but if failed to explain why it would cost $30k.
- PeterisP 4y agoIIRC they quoted $43/book, and to me that sounds right in the ballpark of what I would expect it to cost for printing and shipping a low-quantity issue of a large book.
- Shindi 4y agoIt seems that a lot of people here think that EA focus on AGI is overblown because they personally think that AI risk is overblown. It's certainly debatable if a human level or greater AI will be created in the next 50-100 years. However, if you believe that AGI will be created, then you have to admit that societal impacts will be tremendous, the same level as the advent of nukes. People are pointing out the problems in discrimination that we face with current sub human AI. Imagine AI systems smarter than 90% of humans or smarter than all humans. Wouldn't that make all current problems in AI minuscule if we couldn't control such a program?
- quirkot 4y agoVery disappointed at missing an AMAZING opportunity to say "shut up and multiply" about the funding
- PoignardAzur 4y agoFlippant slogans are bad outreach. Telling people "shut up and change your way of thinking until you agree with you" is a very bad thing to do once you're no longer a fringe movement, even if your way of thinking is right.
- syngrog66 4y agoEA stands for Electronic Arts. in my planet's software field. for decades. was a weird shock to clickthrough on that article link. ;-) "Kids... get off my lawn!"
- bambax 4y agoBut what is "Effective Altruism"? Is it a charity? A movement? Both? The link https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fd3iQRkmCKCCL289u/Effectivealtruism.org https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/fd3iQRkmCKCCL289u/... circles back to itself, with no simple explanation. The "intro" from the front page has 2800+ words and isn't clear either: https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-effective-altruism https://www.effectivealtruism.org/articles/introduction-to-e... That intro is itself prefaced with a paragraph in italics that recommends a whole "handbook" for a "more thorough introduction". I'm afraid to click on that for fear it leads to a whole library of volumes discussing general ideas about life, freedom, religion and other minor and trivial concepts. Why can't organizations' blogs have a simple, clear and easily accessible "about us" link that describes what they do in one sentence.
- dotsam 4y ago> Effective altruism is about doing good better > Effective altruism is a social movement and philosophy focused on maximising the good you can do in your career, projects, and other life decisions. That's the 'what they do in one sentence' from the frontpage of https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ https://www.effectivealtruism.org/
- Shindi 4y agosmh people in this thread using their own ignorance to hate on EA. There are valid criticisms of EA for sure. But let's not argue against straw people