*Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain*

Recall that while some distributions (e.g. the size of the leaves of a tree) follow a Gaussian bell-shaped pattern, many others (e.g. avalanches, size of asteroids, etc.) follow a long-tail distribution. Long-tail distributions have the general property that a large fraction of the volume is accounted for by a tiny percent of instances (e.g. 80% of the snow that falls from the mountain will be the result of the top 20% largest avalanches).

Keeping long-tails in mind: based on previous research we have conducted at the Qualia Research Institute we have arrived at the tentative conclusion that the intensity of pleasure and pain follows a long-tail distribution. Why?

First, neural activity on patches of neural tissue follow log-normal distributions (an instance of a long-tail distribution).

Second, the extremes of pleasure and pain are so intense that they cannot conceivably be just the extremes of a normal distribution. This includes, on the positive end: Jhana meditation, 5-MeO-DMT peak experiences, and temporal lobe epilepsy (Dostoevsky famously saying he'd trade 10 years of his life for just a few moments of his good epileptic experiences). On the negative end, things like kidney stones, cluster headaches, fibromyalgia, and migraines top the charts of most intense pain.

And third, all of the quantitative analysis we conducted on a survey about people's best and worst experiences showed that the ratings, comparisons, and rankings of such experiences was far more consistent with a long-tail distribution than a normal distribution. The data could not be explained with a Gaussian distribution; it fit very nicely a log-normal distribution.

This is an *important*, *tractable*, and *neglected* cause.

1) Important because we may be able to reduce the world's suffering by a significant amount if we just focus on preventing the most intense forms of suffering.

2) Tractable because there are already many possible effective treatments to these disorders (such as LSD microdosing for cluster headaches, and FSM for kidney stones).

3) And neglected because most people have no clue that pain and pleasure go this high. Most utilitarian calculus so far seems to assume a normal distribution for suffering, which is very far from the empirical truth. Bentham would recoil at the lack of an exponent term when additively normalizing pain scales.

Importantly, in Effective Altruism there might be an implicit "youth" bias involved in the lack of knowledge of this phenomenon - due to the age of the people in the movement, most EA activists will not themselves have had intensely painful experiences. Thus, why it is so crucial to raise awareness about this topic in the community (it does not show up on its own). Simply put: because the logarithmic nature of pleasure and pain is *news* to most people in EA.

For more, see the original article: Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain

And a presentation about it that I shared at the New York EA chapter: https://youtu.be/IeD3nZX1Sr4

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[I would prefer the late session if possible]

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[June 22 2020 edit: Thank you all for attending and/or voting for this talk! I appreciated your engagement and questions! For people who would like to see the video, here it is: Effective Altruism and the Logarithmic Scales of Pleasure and Pain]

EAs in Politics and Gov: A Case Study

Who I Am

I was the Senior Campus Outreach Director for the Humane League for 1.5 years, then went on to become the Animal Welfare Liaison for the Office of the Mayor of New York City. I now serve as the Deputy Strategist for the Brooklyn Borough President in NYC, advancing plant-forward initiatives, such as Meatless Mondays and the banning of processed meat.

Summary

Political and governmental involvement seems to be relatively neglected, while simultaneously, tractable, within EA. The presentation will consist of two parts: (i) an examination of effective animal advocacy within NYC government and (ii) a quick guide on how to be more politically involved.

EAs within policy and government can provide political will for electeds and governmental agencies to move on issues they otherwise wouldn’t move on. They also can have more power than outsiders to prevent poor high-level decisions and advocate for positive high-level decisions. These principles can apply to the local, state, and federal level. Working within politics/gov may also provide great career capital, as well as connections.

This presentation will speak about my own work related to animal welfare in NYC in these contexts, and provide a jumping off point for those interested in applying EA to politics and government.

Time Slot

Late session please!

Discussing EA with Non-EA People | External Movement-Building

Premise

When I first started calling myself an Effective Altruist, it was hard to talk about EA to other people. If it came up, I would find myself backed into a corner, ultimately trying to defend utilitarianism to someone who didn’t want to be convinced. These conversations didn’t feel productive. So for a while, I kept EA to myself.

Eventually I looked for carefully-worded, clear ways to explain EA concepts that are non-contentious but still retain fidelity to the heart and values of EA. I’ve learned that just because many people do not want to have long philosophical discussions, look at graphs, and listen to 3-hour podcasts, does not mean they don’t want to do a lot of good. Just like the animal rights movement has had success getting non-vegans to cut back on meat consumption, the EA movement could benefit by promoting certain concepts to people who don’t identify as EA.

Pulling from my 8 years of experience as a “highly-effective” public school educator and 2 years of experience giving and honing my talk about EA for high school and college students (on an irregular basis), I’d like to share my thoughts on goals and best practices for what I call “external movement building,” or the spread of EA ideas outside of the EA community.

Guiding Question

What ideas (if any) should we, the EA community, popularize for the general public? And how should we frame those ideas?

We might want ideas that…

...are not likely to be misinterpreted or misused.

Good candidates will retain fidelity to the heart of EA without requiring “EA Policing.” They will give a clear and foolproof message as they spread around.

...will not be contentious.

We might want the low-hanging fruit of ideas people will easily agree with but just never considered.

...will actually make an impact if applied.

My Current Thinking

I'll explain why I believe we should focus on promoting the use of evidence, leverage, and personal advantage to the general public when they seek to do good.

If chosen, I'd like to be part of the late sessions if possible, thank you!

(And thanks to Aaron Gertler for the revision help!)

Non-hormonal birth control for men and women

YourChoice is developing non-hormonal birth control for both men and women. Nadja Mannowetz has discovered three compounds that bind to sperm and render them immobile. At first, they aim to create a topically applied gel (e.g., on demand birth control for women that would be better than a diaphragm). After that, they’d like to develop an oral product (e.g., a non-hormonal male birth control pill). Eventually, the goal is to create a safe, cheap non-hormonal birth control implant for both men and women. Such an implant would drop the error rate close to zero vs. products that involve more human discretion.

This should be a boon to humanity since it will: 1) slow population growth and reduce our toll on the environment; 2) help people better plan their lives and reproductive decisions; and 3) improve family formation (vs. 40% of births in the U.S. currently being to single parents – this has a particular effect on young boys).

This is:

Important: Few things impact a person’s life more than the decision (or not) to have a child. This is particularly true in developing countries where resources to support a child might be scarce. Also, as developing countries move toward Western standards of living, carbon emissions will balloon if economic growth is coupled with brisk population growth.

Tractable: The compounds currently render sperm immobile in lab conditions, and one of them has already been deemed safe by the FDA. It’s just a matter of engaging in FDA trials to show effectiveness in humans.

Neglected: Male birth control has long been neglected vs. female birth control. Also, many of the attempts at male birth control thus far have been hormonal in nature, and it seems particularly unlikely that many men will be open to this. A non-hormonal approach seems more likely to catch on with men.

Nadja Mannowetz, the Chief Scientific Officer of YourChoice (a YC funded company), has conducted a ton of research (during her PhD, post doc, and after) on sperm motility, and can get into the weeds on the underlying science. She would be happy to discuss the scientific nuances and future potential of non-hormonal birth control for both men and women.

We would prefer the later time slot, but would be open to either.

"Everyday EA" - A new EA podcast

Summary:

I am in the very early stages of creating a new EA podcast with the working title: Everyday EA. The podcast would be informal interviews with people in the EA community (broadly) who are not particularly well known, yet are doing valuable work, even if they aren’t yet the most successful person in their field. I’d like to use this session to get feedback on the initial idea, to talk to people who have podcasting experience, and to search for possible collaborators.

Details:

Many people in the community see the great research, writing, advocacy, and altruism of others and do not feel like they have enough to contribute so lose motivation to contribute at all. They only see the most successful people and think “I cannot achieve that”. This means that we are missing out on a large number of great minds who could help humans and animals now and in the future. I’d like to start a podcast project that promotes the voices of "everyday EAs": relatable role-models in the EA community who, while not necessarily being at the very top of their respective field, are having a meaningful impact that should be celebrated.

Many people (especially EAs?) consume many hours of podcasts. The small number of EA-specific podcasts (The Future of Life Institute podcast, 80,000 hours podcast, to name a few. I compiled a longer list here.) mostly involve interviews with very successful people. I think there is space for a more approachable and relatable podcast.

Benefits to the EA community:

• Create relatable role-models: Make EA relatable through conversations with people who share the listeners’ worries and feelings of inadequacy.
• A platform for early-career EAs to promote their thinking/writing/skills to the EA community.
• A platform to promote diverse experiences and thoughts to broaden the reach of EA.

Key questions and uncertainties:

• Is a podcast the best way to address these problems?
• How could the impact of the podcast be maximised? Episode length, themes, who to interview?
• What level of knowledge should we assume in the audience?
• Would you like to work on this project with me (as an interviewee, co-host, or producer)?

If you have any suggestions about this idea but cannot make it to the unconference, please reply to this comment or reach out to me via private message.

First session is my preference, but I am happy to be considered for either.

Improving access to effective medication to treat cluster ("suicide") headaches

OPIS is an EA-associated think-and-do tank focused on the prevention of intense suffering as an ethical priority (https://www.preventsuffering.org/). We are addressing a few specific causes of suffering and, at a more meta level, working to promote compassionate ethics in governance.

One of our main current areas of focus is cluster headaches, a form of trigeminal autonomic cephalalgia and one of the most painful conditions known to medicine, often driving patients to suicide (https://www.preventsuffering.org/cluster-headaches/). The agony they cause is often compared to having a red hot ice pick driven though the eye into the brain. Attacks typically last one hour and repeat several times a day. Patients are often woken up several times during the night by attacks, and they go to extremes, including banging their head against the wall and punching their head, to try to distract themselves from the severe pain. About 85% of patients have episodic clusters lasting 1-3 months, occurring once or twice a year at the same time of year, during which they have daily recurrences at the frequency mentioned; the other 15% have chronic clusters that can last for years, often with multiple attacks per day and without a single day's break. Although they only affect about 1 in 1000 people, the severity of the pain dramatically increases the scale of the problem.

A large number of patient reports attest to the efficacy of certain indoleamines and related compounds with hallucinogenic properties, including psilocybin, LSD and DMT, both in aborting attacks and in preventing entire episodes. Research reports based on survey results indicate that these compounds can be more effective than standard medical treatments, which are far from satisfactory. But legal restrictions and lack of sufficient information among doctors and patients mean that patients often suffer needlessly.

OPIS is working to improve access to effective treatments through an initiative to change government regulations in some key countries, and improve the information available to patients and doctors.

I propose to give a brief talk about the ethical priority of treating extreme pain, and provide more details about this specific condition and how we are tackling the subject and the challenges faced. I hope to inspire more EAs to consider supporting or becoming active in this and related cause areas.

How financial improvements can counterfactually increase funding for EA charities by tens of thousands to millions of dollars per charity

I run Antigravity Investments, an EA social enterprise with the mission of indirectly donating millions to charity by helping charities invest more effectively. Last year, we published this EA Forum article explaining why charities should shift cash from low-interest to high-interest accounts: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/YjN6cGoXxPZeqCh4Z/eas-and-ea-orgs-should-move-cash-from-low-interest-to-high.

This talk will cover new research done by Antigravity Investments on approximating opportunity costs that charities incur by not following best practices in cash management. We will cover applying our opportunity cost estimation methodology across selected EA charities as well as across a data set of over 300,000 U.S. charities.

We will also cover how our outreach strategy has fared over the past year, and perhaps most importantly, recommend concrete steps EA community members and operations/finance staff at EA organizations can take to increase funding for high-impact causes.

I am based on the West Coast and would prefer the late sessions.

German-speaking EA community

NEAD (Netzwerk für Effektiven Altruismus Deutschland) is the umbrella association for EAs in Germany. We, the organizers, are looking forward to meeting new potential members and get to know EAs from all parts of Germany. We propose a German-speaking EA community meet-up during the unconference.

NEAD is an association that was founded in October 2019. You can read up on our initial objectives in this forum post. Right now we are looking for interested people within the community to become members of NEAD and get involved in our projects.

We want to present what NEAD is doing and how you can be and become a part of our network.

We also want to give you room to exchange your experiences with the virtual conference. Lastly, we want to learn from you what you expect and want from a national-level EA network in Germany :)

We would prefer one of the early time-slots.

*Incremental Reading as a Tool for Improved Learning and Research*

What is incremental reading?

(Note, I’m talking about incremental reading as it is implemented in SuperMemo, not as in Anki’s plugin, polar, or dendro)

Summary: allows for acquiring vast amounts of information efficiently

Many people are already familiar with spaced repetition, which is a good way for memorizing things for long-term recall.

The problem with just using spaced repetition is that it makes memorizing things easy but it doesn't give you a good system for learning things before memorizing them. If you want to go through say, a hundred articles from the original sequences it would be extremely tedious to memorize the important parts in Anki, for example.

Incremental reading fixes this issue by making it easy to:

1. collect all the information you want to learn in one place (electronic material at least)

2. prioritize what you have collected (when you have limited time, prioritizing is helpful for spending time on most important material)

3. Process and break down what you've prioritized (focusing on the parts of material that actually matter)

4. retain what you've processed (with spaced repetition, but a much better algorithm than anki)

How does this apply to EA?

Summary: improves creative/problem solving abilities significantly

If you want to be an expert, regardless of field, knowledge plays a large role. The problem with acquiring knowledge sufficient to be an expert is that at some point you may end up forgetting at the same rate you’re learning new things. Traditionally, the way most experts overcome this is by slowly amassing experience over years.

Incremental reading allows for linear knowledge acquisition which enables you to become an expert much more quickly than through traditional learning. For anyone in EA doing academic research, incremental reading could substantially improve their abilities.

Conservatively, I would expect an improvement of 20% in knowledge acquisition rate and problem solving ability in a proficient user over 10 years. Though multiples higher than that wouldn’t surprise me.

Much of that comes from incremental reading enabling users to generalize more effectively. If you work as a psychologist, while you might remember some of the things you read about other subjects, you would end up knowing the most about the things you apply a lot and forget the things you don't. Incremental reading makes it practical to remember things from other subjects even if you won't use them daily. The associative power of knowledge means that by having familiarity with other subjects your ability to solve problems improves. There are few problems whose solutions lie in a single realm alone.

What would I present on?

What incremental reading entails and what benefits you end up with from using it, to allow people to decide if it could be worth learning for them.

If I have time, I could go into a brief primer on what makes learning pleasurable which ties into what makes (at least for me) incremental reading the best learning method there is.

EAs are Underrating the Anti-slavery Cause

Around the world, tens of millions of innocent people are enslaved in sweatshops, brick kilns & brothels, on farms and fishing vessels, inside homes, and in other dire situations. The largest categories of modern-day slavery are forced labour, bonded labour (a.k.a. debt bondage), sexual slavery, and coerced marriage.

In 2016, Giving What We Can (a part of the Centre for Effective Altruism) rated this cause at 3 stars out of a possible 5 in terms of its importance, neglectedness, and tractability. Also, it rated "the best [anti-slavery] charity we can find" (The Freedom Fund) -- focussing on its work in India in particular -- as follows:

cost-effectiveness -- 3 stars (out of 5)

robustness of evidence - 3 stars

quality of implementation - 4 stars

But last September, The Freedom Fund released new data about its recent work in 3 states of India that showed an approximate 125,000-person decline in bonded labour. This decline -- relative to the (untouted) cost of it -- leads to my rough estimate that the cost of each free person who otherwise would have been in bonded labour was $80 or 71 euros.

This indicates that -- contrary to GWWC's rating in 2016 -- The Freedom Fund's more recent efforts to reduce bonded labour in parts of India have been highly cost-effective.

In talking about modern-day slavery in terms of EA, I'd also discuss the range of disability factors that Giving What We Can used in 2016 (for the value of sparing someone from enslavement relative to the value of saving someone's life). The mid-point of the range was 0.5 -- which would mean that sparing 2 people from enslavement would be equal in value to saving 1 person's life. But the evaluation also said the value of freedom might be much lower or much higher. (Putting a higher value on freedom from slavery would have raised the 3-star rating that GWWC put on the importance of the cause.)

I'd also like to explain why optimal efforts against slavery in some settings (such as brick kilns) are much more cost-effective than optimal efforts against modern-day slavery in more diffuse situations (such as coerced marriages).

NOTE: My sources include reports by The Freedom Fund, books by Siddharth Kara (Modern Slavery, Bonded Labour), books by Kevin Bales (Ending Slavery, Disposable People), U.S. State Department Trafficking in Persons Reports, International Labour Organization reports, interviews with survivors, prosecutors, activists & care providers.

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A Mindful Approach to Tackling those Yucky Tasks You’ve Been Putting Off

For many of us, procrastination is a problem. This can take many forms, but we’ll focus on relatively simple tasks that you’ve been putting off long-term.

Epistemic status: speculative, n=1 stuff.

Yucky Tasks

Yucky tasks may be thought of several ways:

• things you’ve been putting off
• tasks which generate complex, negative emotions.
• that vague thing that you know is there but it's hard to get a grip on and you’re all like uhggggg

The connection to EA?

EA is not about following well-trodden paths. We’re all trying to do something different and new, and stepping out of comfort zones.

• donating big sums of money to unusual causes
• seeing the world through an unusual lens
• reaching out to people we don’t know
• planning our careers and our finances
• and more
• all while staying organized in our personal lives

For some of us, we may be exceptionally talented or productive in some domains, but find some of the tasks elusive or hard to get a grip on.

So what happens?

Most commonly avoidance. This can go on until there’s some kind of shift: maybe we avoid something until it becomes super urgent, or maybe we just wait until our feelings around it become clearer.

Forcing ourselves to jump right in, tackling the task “forcefully” using all our available willpower. Though this can get the job done it can be unpleasant and unsustainable - we’ll remember all that negativity for the next time, and thus make the next task more difficult. Especially disruptive when working with others.

What’s an alternative?

This talk is about discovering and mapping our mental landscapes surrounding a problem. Tasks, and their associated thoughts and emotions, can be mapped out in a rich web. Often, different sub-tasks will be associated with different emotions, and seeing this laid out can help with getting our emotional bearings, as well as practical problem-solving.

The result is unpacking a complex, muddied anxiety or resentment into something cleaner and truer. We’re still at early stages but we’re hoping to build this technique out into something robust that can help those of us in the EA movement overcome the blocks to personal effectiveness.

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(I would like to be part of the late session)

Potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in catastrophic scenarios

My name is Juan B. García Martínez, research associate of the Alliance to Feed the Earth in Disasters (ALLFED). My colleagues Joseph Egbejimba, James Throup, Silvio Matassa, Joshua M. Pearce, David C. Denkenberger and I have researched the potential of microbial protein from hydrogen for preventing mass starvation in global catastrophic scenarios.

As members of ALLFED we are concerned by the fact that the current global food system is critically unprepared for extreme catastrophes of non-negligible likelihood, such as supervolcanic eruptions, asteroid impacts, nuclear wars or pandemics that disrupt food trade. Instead of giving up in the face of this fact, we study potential solutions that could help in such events.

Abstract

Human civilization’s food production system is currently unprepared for catastrophes that would reduce global food production by 10% or more, such as nuclear winter, supervolcanic eruptions or asteroid impacts. Alternative foods that do not require much or any sunlight have been proposed as a more cost-effective solution than increasing food stockpiles, given the long duration of many global catastrophic risks (GCRs) that could hamper conventional agriculture for 5 to 10 years.

Microbial food from single cell protein (SCP) produced via hydrogen from both gasification and electrolysis is analyzed in this study as alternative food for the most severe food shock scenario: a sun-blocking catastrophe. Capital costs, resource requirements and ramp up rates are quantified to determine its viability. Potential bottlenecks to fast deployment of the technology are reviewed.

The ramp up speed of food production for 24/7 construction of the facilities over 6 years is estimated to be lower than other alternatives (3-10% of the global protein requirements could be fulfilled at end of first year), but the quality of the microbial protein is higher than most others. Results indicate that investment in SCP scaleup should be limited to the production capacity that is needed to fulfill only the minimum recommended protein requirements of humanity during the catastrophe. Further research is needed into more uncertain concerns such as transferability of labor and equipment production. This could help reduce the negative impact of potential food-related GCRs.

Time preference: late session.

Avoiding Infocalypse: How a decline in epistemic competence makes catastrophic risks inevitable — and what EA's can do about it

This would be shortened and modified version of a talk I gave at Cambridge University, at the Leverhulme Centre for the Future of Intelligence and Centre for the Study of Existential Risk. The general public version of many of the ideas can be found in this TEDx talk that I gave in 2018 (ignore the title, not my choice).

Part 1: Framing the underlying problem

Describe what is meant by epistemic competence (the ability or desire for individuals, organizations, governments, etc. to effectively make sense of the world). Illustrate how it is declining, and how that is likely to get worse.

Part 2: Connect to catastrophic risks
Describe how lower epistemic competence makes it extremely difficult to do any sort of crucial coordination, making global coordination on catastrophic risks increasingly unlikely. In addition, lower epistemic competence makes catastrophic forcing functions more likely and individual mitigation steps less likely.

Part 3: Exploring mitigations

Discuss what can be done, and show that many of these problems are related to other better understood EA cause areas (including e.g. the connection between synthetic media and AGI).

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More about my work here for context: aviv.me, twitter.com/metaviv.

I would be interested in a late session. My goal is to more broadly circulate these concerns in the EA community, which I have been adjacent to for many years (e.g. this podcast episode I did with Julia Galef) but never deeply engaged.

Authentic Relating, Changing People's Minds, and Increasing Communication Capacity

Summary

We would like to share insights and discuss an authentic relating practise known as circling. Circling is an activity designed to create an “authentic” and “alive” atmosphere, as well as increase the participants' (and facilitators) capacity for empathy, connection, and sharing “cruxes”.

Background

A common problem around “convincing” people to adopt EA values or change their behaviors to be more EA aligned, is accessing the emotional part(s) of themselves that can make the decisions and feel good about it in a way that can permeate into their lives.

The kind of circling that we do creates an atmosphere of vulnerability, emotional openness. During these sessions participants connect to what they personally find truly important and how they want to live their lives.

A secondary effect of participating in these circling (among many), is an increased capacity for those involved to have a better experiential understanding of how people make decisions, how they choose what to share, and how vulnerable they can be.

Presentation

We would like to present a brief introduction to circling, some common states of mind that it can produce, and some future possibilities.

Who We are

My name is Daniel Tabakman, I founded the rationality meetup group in Ottawa, and ran the Toronto branch for some time. Currently I am part of ThinkBetter, (thinkbetter.ca) a decentralized meta community who’s founders came out of EA.

Time Slot

Strong preference to not overlap with any other ThinkBetter speakers .

More information

• ThinkBetter website- thinkbetter.ca
• Contact info [email protected]

A Metamodern Approach to "Leveling-up" Humanity

ThinkBetter was founded by five EAs in Toronto with the mission of creating a scalable rationality training program, and the goal of materially raising the global sanity waterline. Through a series of rapid-prototyping and OODA loops, we ended up 'transcending and including' our initial curriculum and strategy, and are now working with a deeper understanding of the complexity of the challenge.

I'd be interested in starting a discussion to share:

• Our journey
• A new approach to learning that we are finding highly effective
• The emerging ecosystem of individuals, teams, and communities that are all working on different parts of the human development stack
• And of course - how our perspective on EA is shifting as we learn to 'see' higher levels of complexity

The Importance of the Arts in Effective Altruism and Social Change

While art is a powerful agent to create social change by incentivizing civic engagement, political movements typically miss critical opportunities to collaborate with artists. The presentation will begin by analyzing the theory why art creates impact. As a practice-led researcher, I will analyze both my art and the art of other artists aimed at fabricating social change. I will explain why certain interventions are more effective than others, and how we can leverage these ideas to create social change.

The lack of funding for arts research creates a lack of empirical evidence for the effectiveness of art. While the few studies have indicated that the arts is an effective agent for social change, less than 3% of funding in the arts are used for arts research within the US. Therefore, I will discuss the empirical evidence behind art for social change and why arts research needs more funding.

Despite multi-million dollar donations within the art world, these funds are disproportionately concentrated among few artists, curators, and collectors. Meanwhile, the average artist will live below the poverty line at some point in their career and arts programs focusing on impoverish communities struggle to raise enough funds. Therefore, the distribution of funds within the arts is critical in supporting socially conscious artists in changing their communities.

The final section will discuss what effective altruists can do to shift the distribution of wealth and increase available funds within the arts. As the effective altruist movement becomes mainstream, conversations around supporting socially conscious artists and arts research can create an environment that is conducive to help communities create social change.

The importance and challenges of estimating existential risk

To make effective prioritisation decisions in relation to existential risks, we need estimates of the risks from various sources and of how various actions would reduce those risks. However, such estimates are extremely rare, extremely hard to make, and extremely hard to judge the reliability of. These conditions create risks of either ignoring expert views or overly anchoring on them, and of overlooking either the points of consensus that do exist or the vast disagreements and uncertainties that remain.

To mitigate these issues, I’ve collected all estimates of existential risk (or similarly extreme outcomes) I could find in a single database. This database can be collaboratively added to over time as new estimates are made or old estimates found, and it currently has ~70 existential risk estimates.

This session would expand on the above points, discussing why we need existential risk estimates, why it's hard to make such estimates or even just to know how much we should update our beliefs based on experts' estimates, what options this leaves us with, and why building and using this database is the best of those options.

I'll be giving a 5-minute lightning talk at EAGx on the same topic, so I could either:

• keep my presentation short and leave more time for free-form discussion of this and related topics (e.g., best practice when forecasting),
• bring back into my presentation various details I brutally cut for the lightning talk, or
• combine a short presentation on this with a short presentation on the related matter of "crucial questions for longtermists" (see my comment below)

(I'd prefer the early session.)

What prevents researchers from prioritising x-risk?

Questions

This proposal aims to answer the following questions:

• What are researchers' existing beliefs about existential risks?
• How are their actions concerning existential risk mitigation dependent on their beliefs?
• What factors might explain researchers not prioritising existential risk?

Background

Most longtermist EA-inspired organisations advocate for and support research on existential risk (among other topics). They do so, presumably, in the hope that, by providing information and resources to researchers, researchers' views and efforts will shift in favour of more impactful topics.

Yet, little is known about several factors that appear critical to this theory of change. I am not aware of work concerning:

• Researchers' existing beliefs about the prevalence of and relative concern caused by existential risks.
• The extent to which providing information and research support related to existential risk affect researchers' beliefs and downstream actions.
• The barriers to researchers' prioritising work related to existential risk.

(That said, I am sure that research exists on questions broadly analogous to those above.)

Methods

I first need some context with many researchers. I do not yet have a clear idea of what form this context might take. Academic conferences seem most fitting, but are not practical in the short term. The obvious alternative is to conduct surveys over the internet following personal emails; in this case, one concern is that selection in to and out of the data could be a significant issue.

Regardless of the exact context chosen, I will first design surveys to characterise beliefs about existential risk. In eliciting beliefs, some or all participants could be incentivised to answer with estimates as close to expert opinion as possible. (This is standard procedure in economics, although usually one is trying to elicit a participant's best guess of something closer to 'ground truth'.) The survey might also ask participants to estimate small but mundane risks -- e.g. the probability that a randomly chosen person might be struck by lightning that day -- so that survey responses can be more easily compared, and perhaps even filtered or reweighted.

I will also estimate participant's preferences over trade-offs related to existential risk. This part of the survey might ask, for example: how many statistical lives saved with certainty is equivalently good to a 1% reduction in existential risk next year? (See slides 20-27 on Alsan et al. (2020)).

Next, I envision a field experiment with researchers. I will test the degree to which researchers (1) value information about existential risk and (2) respond to evidence and support in their beliefs, preferences, and actions relating to existential risk. This "evidence and support" might take the form of risk estimates from Ord (2020), and suggestions from research priorities organisations on how to reorient research towards existential risk reduction.

In the experiment, I will first measure participants' willingness to pay (WTP) for evidence and support. Second, I will evaluate participants' response to receiving evidence and support on (a) survey outcomes, immediately after receiving information and again some years in the future, (b) measurable non-survey outcomes. I have yet to settle on which outcomes to include in (b), but suggestions include: quantity of articles produced relating to existential risk, donations to charities relevant to existential risk, and so on.

Finally, upon analysing the data, I will explore mechanisms which might play a role in successfully shifting researchers' focus towards existential risk. This process may include conducting follow-up experiments.

Uncertainties

I welcome feedback on anything/everything above, but some uncertainties that immediately stand out to me:

• Which contexts might be most appropriate and amenable for experiments?
• Which mechanisms seem most likely to be important ahead of time? (Such that I could include considerations for them in the main experiment.)
• Which other trade-off questions might I include? I want this section to get at: if existential risks are made more salient and/or made to appear more tractable, how do perceptions of trade-offs (to be related to research inputs) change? But maybe there is a clearer question to be asked here.
• How might my big-picture questions be misspecified? Relatedly, which big-picture questions might be more interesting and might therefore lead to different experiments/analysis?

Session

EDIT: Happy with either session!

*Match for More*--An organization seeking to cultivate a community of EA professionals who leverage their company's matching program towards EA-align charities/causes.

My colleague and I have been working on developing an organization/community that, similar to the way GWWC fosters a community of effective givers who pledge 10% of their income, we look to cultivate a community of those effectively leveraging their company’s matching opportunities, and specifically leveraging them towards various EA-aligned causes and organizations. We believe that this organization, called 'Match for More', can have an impact on professionals’ charitable contributions and longevity, their allocation effectiveness, and their ability to speak more about their donation opportunities in a social atmosphere that will continue to motivate and spread the giving mentality that lies at the core of EA values.

More details:

After just a bit of research, and some polling in various online EA communities, we’ve learned that there are already EAs out there taking full advantage of their matching opportunities, whether their own or that of their spouse or partner. Of the numerous companies currently offering such opportunities, many boast matchings in the 5-figure territory, and several with a multiplication factors more than just 1:1.

One of the great things about Match for More is that there is very little cost in getting it off the ground, outside of the labor it takes to start the initial community, build a website, and look for innovative ways to increase our potential impact both within the broader EA community and the corporate world. Along with the ‘foster a community outlook’ that Match for More seeks to pursue, we are also considering a type of *EA Ambassador Program*, which would allow employees of professional organizations to better bring EA principles into consideration at the corporate level. This could mean anything from initiating matching opportunities for employees where they do not already exist, having company’s reconsider strategies for their large-budget philanthropic efforts that are often allocated across a wide range of causes, and generally spreading the EA mentality to others they work with in the professional setting each and every day. While we’ve seen workplace activism within the EA community break ground on a few different fronts, there seems to be great opportunity for a focused and organized effort that can provide resources, advice, and general support for those with access to corporate communities and who are looking to spread our ideals.

As our organization is still in its early stages, we are keen to hear feedback about the organization goals in general. With the idea of a community at the core of our mission, we would love ideas on how best to consider membership of such a community. For example, how should someone taking full advantage of a $2000 match be included vs someone matching $5000 of a potential $50k match that they have on offer? How best can we consider inclusion criteria for the breadth of EA-aligned charities to grow our community and maintain freedom for those who prioritize various causes? What outlets would be best for growing our community at both early and late stages?

All of this, along with the general aims of Match for More, would be cause for a great discussion with like-minded EAs who share in our values and seek to increase impact where we can!

Thanks for organising this Unconference! I really enjoyed both presenting and attending.

It seemed there were a lot of interested attendees, a lot of applications to present, and some applications that came in after the deadline. (Meaning there were some cool-sounding things I didn't get to see, like alexrjl and JuanGarcia's ideas!) And it seemed like this is a cool opportunity for people to raise some awareness of their ideas/projects and get feedback, and for attendees from across the world to make connections during the Q&As and icebreakers.

So I wonder if it might be worth doing something like this every month or two? There could be either this post or a new post where people can apply on a rolling basis by commenting, and each month or two the 4-8 applications with the highest karma that haven't already been done go ahead. And then new people can apply for the next time, and the prior applications can continue to gain karma. And maybe there'd just be one "track" for each time slot, as there's always next time to do presentations that couldn't be gotten to this time.

I imagine the EAGxVirtual team would do a great job of this, but also that someone else could pick it up if they've now done all the virtual conference organising they'd like to do for a lifetime?

I'd be interested to hear people's thoughts on this (and to attend future Unconferences, if someone does pick this up). I guess perhaps interest could be gauged with a poll on the main EA Facebook group, and/or a new post/"question" on the Forum?

What is the best leadership structure for (college) EA clubs?

A few people in the EA group organizers slack (6 to be exact) expressed interest in discussing this.

Here are some ideas for topics to cover:

• The best overall structure (What positions should there be etc.
• Should there be regular meetings among all general members/ club leaders?
• What are some mistakes to avoid?
• What are some things that generally work well?
• How to select leaders

I envision this as an open discussion for people to share their experiences. At the end, we could compile the result of our discussion into a forum post.

Demand Reduction is a neglected approach in climate solutions

We want to share some ideas about demand reduction, which we feel is a neglected approach to addressing climate change. We would like to get feedback on these ideas and connect with other like-minded EAs. These are early-stage ideas that we are still making more rigorous and actionable.

Whereas energy efficiency improvements reduce energy and resource demands by making certain behaviors and processes more efficient, demand reduction is about reducing or eliminating those behaviors and processes altogether, thus avoiding issues like the rebound effect (see Jevons paradox and Khazzoom-Brookes postulate). For instance, whereas a mainstream approach to reducing the environmental impact of transportation would focus on shifting travel to trains or electric vehicles, a demand reduction approach would focus more on reducing the need for commuting and travel overall.

Demand reduction has several advantages as an approach: it comprehensively reduces environmental burdens, rather than only reducing emissions; it is less dependent on technological progress; it is less dependent on new investment; it is less complex and thus more robust; and it is complementary to existing approaches, by making goals like 100% renewable and net-zero emissions easier to reach. We will explain these in more detail during the talk.

Despite these advantages, demand reduction is not widely discussed in environmental circles as an approach to climate change. The climate discussion seems to be dominated by investment-oriented ideas like clean energy, creation of clean jobs, and technological innovations that may have their own unique environmental burdens. We are not aware of efforts to research demand reduction policies or marketing, meaning that some research could make it a more tractable space to explore for addressing climate issues.

Demand reduction is associated with ideas like degrowth and steady-state economics, but those areas spend a lot of time debating abstract and high-level issues about capitalism and growth, often in the language of academic social science. We think there may be an opportunity for impact by side-stepping ideological debates and distilling the ideas that are most actionable into language that is understood by a broader audience. We see this as a potentially general mechanism that EAs could have impact.

We can only participate in the late sessions (9-16).

Geographic diversity in EA:

Here´s a link to my recent post about it: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zDktSTEstmy2X5big/geographic-diversity-in-ea

content copied here:

I suspect that due to lack of diversity, questions that could be relevant to EA have not been considered enough and here I share some of the ones that I deal with the most (although I don't have a strong position about most of these things and probably I just have not been aware if they DO HAVE been considered, in that case I would appreciate a lot if you could send links or recommendations):

-Whether giving locally could be better (or not) for donors in low and middle income countries:

Countries with weak currencies such as mine face high exchange rates (especially in hard times such as this pandemic). I have the intuition that with a volatile dollar price it doesn't always make sense to donate to EA recommended charities and perhaps donors could allocate better their donations by donating locally. In my case I just switch to save and donate later (because I'm young and my salary is low haha) but what if I still want to donate a little bit to keep motivation? Or what if I want to convince my friend's uncle to donate?I still want to have an informed opinion.

-Spot regional differences within countries when answering different types of questions: Even if my country's GDP is higher than many countries where effective donations according to EA are allocated, there are many regions within my country where poverty is extremely high, even higher than in richer cities from poorer countries. Those differences are hard to spot if EA spots “poverty” as a whole without zooming in geographical zones.

-Addressing the real potential of going into policy in LMICs: EA recommends policy careers but I suspect that it's an even more important path in LMICs, where policies are weaker, policymakers are even less evidence based and where institutions have a lot more potential to improve.

-Whether there is a chance to adapt EA to other cultural values:

Individualism vs collectivism: I feel that EA was born in cultures that value individualistic goals (even if the focus is on the world as a whole). For example, I see EA deeply linked to “western”´s understanding of freedom, independence of thought, skepticism, mistrust for authority and social norms, etc… However, other cultures with more collectivist mindsets can struggle to link altruism to those specific values. In many cultures altruism is deeply linked to religion or family bonds and giving is prioritized when you help those that surround you. Even if there is no rational argument to value more a life in my country vs a life in sub-saharan Africa, what if EA is losing an opportunity to take advantage of these cultural drives towards giving by, for example, strengthening local networks of charities.

Nationalism: Even if I'm not fond of nationalism I do recognize it as a huge drive for altruism in my country (probably in many others as well). I won't convince my friend's uncle to donate to Against Malaria but I could convince him to donate to a colombian charity. Could we use those emotional bonds to promote doing good in an effective way at the same time?

-I wonder if there is a bias when EA talks about problems not being “neglected” enough when dismissing some cause areas or focus topics: an example that comes to my mind is gender inequality in governments or in the workplace. In EA there is a whole focus area on improving institutional decision making, which is great (actually there is where I want to focus); but what if there are easier and more urgent steps to be taken towards IIDM in LMICs such as focusing on women's access to governments (something that in high income countries is not that neglected and has been widely addressed, or at least a lot more than in other countries). So would donating to organizations that are promoting women participation in governments in LMICS be a good cause to donate, taking into account that institutions in these countries face a huge problem that comes even before cognitive biases or poor decision making processes and it's that there is not enough representation of 50% of the population?

I would love to know what has been said about these topics and feel free to reach out.

WORKSHOP: Global development negotiation

~~ Learn global development negotiation techniques from a trained negotiator. ~~

My background:

• MA in Economic Diplomacy, international development focus
• Negotiating for cost-effective environmental actions with the UN

Structure:

Why to negotiate for global development? (0-1 min)

Negotiation techniques (with examples) (1-5 min)

• Ask for more, insist & refine
• Repetition & Memos
• Respond, then advocate
• Personal example
• Respect decisions
• Focus on outcome, not power dynamics

Q&A (5-13 min)

Role-playing workshop on the Icebreaker platform (13-21 min)

1. Customer representative lobbies their CFO

2. College student lobbies a local celebrity

3. Mid-level manager lobbies their CEO

4. Yacht owner lobbies their friend

Reflection and further steps (21-30 min)

(Strong preference for the late session.)

AI Safety Career Circle

Putting this suggestion out there, because there are always people looking for AI Safety career advise, and this is a tried and tested format.

First round, everyone shares their career plans (or lack of plans).

Second round everyone who wants to shares career advise that they think might be helpful for others in the circle.

Must be late session if you want me to lead it.

Using General Collective Intelligence to Break through the Barriers to Global Transformation

I'd like to give a presentation on General Collective Intelligence or GCI, which is a decision-making system that combines groups into a single collective intelligence with vastly greater general problem-solving ability than any individual in the group. In this presentation I'd like to talk about why GCI might be critical to achieving virtually every group challenge when the group is big enough, potentially including all the global outcomes targeted by every individual at the EAGxVirtual conference. And why because of hidden bugs in our decision-making processes, without GCI we not have the ability to actually see the real problem or understand the real solutions to global challenges, and end up solving the wrong problem with the wrong solution. I'll also explore why, because of these and many other reasons, GCI is potentially one of the most important initiatives today.

Add resources to the EAGxVirtual Notes

Wait! I know this may not sound groundbreaking but I think a collaborative session to link lots of related resources and opinions could be valuable.

What would we do?

For half and hour a group, with a video call would add resources and thoughts to the notes here: https://roamresearch.com/#/app/nathanpmyoung/page/yyARa8VKX

Why is this valuable?

We would end up with a much better and more linked set of notes, that would better answer peoples questions and give them more to read.

Also, we could use this to test out whther this is a a feasible strategy for the future. Should we often use collaborative note taking? Do we find it provides us with resources we wouldn't see otherwise?

If you think this isn't valuable?

I'd be interested to hear why. Improving and networking the notes from talks seems like an obvious benefit if the talks themselves were valuable. If it isn't, then do people not expect to read the notes in future or revisit the videos? Interested in your thoughts.