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27RyanCarey3moEA Highschool Outreach Org (see Catherine's [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/L5t3EPnWSj7D3DpGt/high-school-ea-outreach] and Buck's posts [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HcaB2kJKhxJtS4oGc/some-thoughts-on-ea-outreach-to-high-schoolers] , my comment on EA teachers [https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/HcaB2kJKhxJtS4oGc/some-thoughts-on-ea-outreach-to-high-schoolers?commentId=WhPpB6ZcohbmEtDJq] ) Running a literal school would be awesome, but seems too consuming of time and organisational resources to do right now.Assuming we did want to do that eventually, what could be a suitable smaller step? Founding an organisation with vetted staff, working full-time on promoting analytical and altruistic thinking to high-schoolers - professionalising in this way increases the safety and reputability of these programs. Its activities should be targeted to top schools, and could include, in increasing order of duration: 1. One-off outreach talks at top schools 2. Summer programs in more countries, and in more subjects, and with more of an altruistic bent (i.e. variations on SPARC and Eurosparc) 3. Recurring classes in things like philosophy, econ, and EA. Teaching by visitors could be arranged by liaising to school teachers, similarly to how external teachers are brought in for chess classes. 4. After-school, or weekend, programs for interested students I'm not confident this would go well, given the various reports from Catherine's recap and Buck's further theorising. But targeting the right students, and bringing the right speakers, gives it a chance of success. If you get to (3-4), all is going well, and the number of interested teachers and students are rising, it would be very natural for the org to scale into a school proper.

16Buck3mo[This is an excerpt from a longer post I'm writing] Suppose someone’s utility function is U = f(C) + D Where U is what they’re optimizing, C is their personal consumption, f is their selfish welfare as a function of consumption (log is a classic choice for f), and D is their amount of donations. Suppose that they have diminishing utility wrt (“with respect to”) consumption (that is, df(C)/dC is strictly monotonically decreasing). Their marginal utility wrt donations is a constant, and their marginal utility wrt consumption is a decreasing function. There has to be some level of consumption where they are indifferent between donating a marginal dollar and consuming it. Below this level of consumption, they’ll prefer consuming dollars to donating them, and so they will always consume them. And above it, they’ll prefer donating dollars to consuming them, and so will always donate them. And this is why the GWWC pledge asks you to input the C such that dF(C)/d(C) is 1, and you pledge to donate everything above it and nothing below it. This is clearly not what happens. Why? I can think of a few reasons. * The above is what you get if the selfish and altruistic parts of you “negotiate” once, before you find out how high your salary is going to be. If instead, you negotiate every year to spend some fair share of your resources on altruistic and selfish resources, you get something like what we see. * People aren’t scope sensitive about donations, and so donations also have diminishing marginal returns (because small ones are disproportionately good at making people think you’re good). * When you’re already donating a lot, other EAs will be less likely to hold consumption against you (perhaps because they want to incentivize rich and altruistic people to hang out in EA without feeling judged for only donating 90% of their $10M annual expenditure or whatever). * When you’re high income, expensive time-money tradeoffs like business class fl

15nora3moBelow, I briefly discuss some motivating reasons, as I see them, to foster more interdisciplinary thought in EA. This includes ways EA's current set of research topics might have emerged for suboptimal reasons. MORE EA-RELEVANT INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH : WHY? The ocean of knowledge is vast. But the knowledge commonly referenced within EA and longtermism represents only a tiny fraction of this ocean. I argue that EA's knowledge tradition is skewed for reasons including but not-limited-to the epistemic merit of those bodies of knowledge. There are good reasons for EA to focus in certain areas: * Direct relevance (e.g. if you're trying to do good, it seems clearly relevant to look into philosophy a bunch; if you're trying to do good effectively, it seems clearly relevant to look into economics (among others) a bunch; if you came to think that existential risks are a big deal, it is clearly relevant to look into bioengineering, international relations, etc. a bunch; etc.) * Evidence of epistemic merit (e.g. physics has more evidence for epistemic merit than psychology, which in return has more evidence for epistemic merit than astrology; in other words, beliefs gathered from different fields are are likely to pay more/less rent [https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/making-beliefs-pay-rent], or are likely to be more/less explanatory virtuous [https://arxiv.org/abs/2006.02359]) However, some of the reasons we’ve ended up with our current foci may not be as good: * Founder effects [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Founder_effect] * The, in parts arbitrary, way academic disciplines have been carved up * Inferential distances between knowledge traditions that hamper the free diffusion of knowledge between disciplines and schools of thought Having a skewed knowledge basis is problematic. There is a significant likelihood that we are missing out on insights or perspectives that might critically advance our undertaking. We don’t know what we d

14RyanCarey3moMaking community-building grants more attractive An organiser from Stanford EA asked me today how community building grants could be made more attractive. I have two reactions: 1. Specialised career pathways. To the extent that this can be done without compromising effectiveness, community-builders should be allowed to build field-specialisations, rather than just geographic ones. Currently, community-builders might hope to work at general outreach orgs like CEA and 80k. But general orgs will only offer so many jobs. Casting the net a bit wider, many activities of Forethought Foundation, SERI, LPP, and FLI are field-specific outreach. If community-builders take on some semi-specialised kinds of work in AI, or policy, or econ, (in connection with these orgs or independently) then this would aid their prospects of working for such orgs or returning to a more mainstream pathway. 2. "Owning it". To the extent that community building does not offer a specialised career pathway, the fact that it's a bold move should be incorporated into the branding. The Thiel Fellowship offers $100k to ~2 dozen students per year, to drop out of their programs to work on a startup that might change the world. Not everyone will like it, but it's bold, it's a round, and reasonably-sized number, with a name attached, and a dedicated website. Imagine a "Macaskill fellowship" that offers $100k for a student from a top university to pause their studies and spend one year focusing on promoting prioritisation and long-term thinking - it'd be a more attractive path.

14nora3moThe below provides definitions and explanations of "domain scanning" and "epistemic translation", in an attempt of adding further gears to how interdisciplinary research works. DOMAIN SCANNING AND EPISTEMIC TRANSLATION I suggest understanding domain scanning and epistemic translation as a specific type of research that both plays (or ought to play) an important role as part of a larger research progress, or can be usefully pursued as “its own thing”. DOMAIN SCANNING By domain scanning, I mean the activity of searching through diverse bodies and traditions of knowledge with the goal of identifying insights, ontologies or methods relevant to another body of knowledge or to a research question (e.g. AI alignment, Longtermism, EA). I call source domains those bodies of knowledge where insights are being drawn from. The body of knowledge that we are trying to inform through this approach is called the target domain. A target domain can be as broad as an entire field or subfield or a specific research problem (in which case I often use the term target problem instead of target domain). Domain scanning isn’t about comprehensively surveying the entire ocean of knowledge, but instead about selectively scouting for “bright spots” - domains that might importantly inform the target domain or problem. An important rationale for domain scanning is the belief that model selection is a critical part of the research process. By model selection, I mean the way we choose to conceptualize a problem at a high-level of abstraction (as opposed to, say, working out the details given a certain model choice). In practice, however, this step often doesn’t happen at all because most research happens within a paradigm that is already “in the water”. As an example, say an economist wants to think about a research question related to economic growth. They will think about how to model economic growth and will make choices according to the shape of their research problem. They might fo

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