Researching donation opportunities. Previously: ailabwatch.org.
Zach Stein-Perlman
Karma: 11,396
I really like The Sequences, Truth Won’t Treat You Kind, and I Tried. Also maybe Nothing Is Mere and Right Here.
I don’t get I Knew the Name.
When I post on LW, I think the impact is something like:
20% informing people who browse LW
30% informing people who are linked to a post (by me or others), or for whom it’s overdetermined that they’ll read the post
20% people who read the posts helping me: they leave helpful comments or talk to me or [share docs with me / ask to collaborate with me / think of me when working on something related in the future]
30% giving me status or something, and causing people to [think of / respect] me in certain domains
3 and 4 overlap. In the last week there were two times a person/org asked me to help them with something that I was very excited to help with, and at least one of them was downstream of my recent posting.
For people following my daily posting: this is the last of my daily posts. I failed to write some posts that I really want to exist:
Donations are super important
The US government is super important
Don’t diversify your impact[1]
Buying galaxies is not cost-effective
I hope to cause most of these posts to exist in April.
- ^
This is too strong — some limited diversification is defensible but many people are underprioritizing scope-sensitive stuff for confused reasons
Sure, divide by 1000 or something
Of course!
I agree things aren’t as simple as ”
Yes. FTL would be surprising given that we find ourselves in a 14 billion year old universe — you’d expect there to be aliens by now. But:
We will likely have better things to do than simulate humans
Mature technology may enable more computation than the conservative guess in this piece
Acausal trade and ECL may present opportunities to have effects outside the lightcone
There are probably more such considerations!
I agree? This applies more to donating to orgs than donating to politicians. And regardless when my team recommends donating to politicians, usually we have a fundraising target after which we no longer recommend it (and sometimes we ask for pledges and then ask a subset of pledgers to donate, in order to hit the target and avoid using small donors unnecessarily), and other times we’re like “this is one of the best opportunities; the optimal amount of money we could raise is more than we will actually be able to raise because there aren’t enough small donors; everyone should donate (after donating to everything better and having a certain budget saved for future small-donor opportunities).” (Most of our recommendations are the former kind, but a donor might tend to hear about the latter kind because for the former we only need to tell a small set of donors while for the latter we’re telling everyone who might be interested.)
How are you supposed to “account[] for that uncertainty”? I think you notice it, you try really hard to make sure that your parameters are right, and then at the end of the day you take the expectation.
I read this in 2019; it helped me understand that the long-term future is astronomically more important than whatever happens on Earth this millennium. See also Astronomical Waste.
Edit: but as various commenters observe, the actual amount you should care about the long-term future and space stuff isn’t super related to the
Nick Bostrom: How big is the cosmic endowment?
I failed to illustrate what goes wrong when people naively make up distributions rather than thinking carefully about EV. Here’s a quick squiggle:
The EV of a (and b and c) is
Squiggle makes it easy to use distributions — but if you don’t put serious effort into it, your squiggle model will have predictably flawed parameters.
Stop asking “how good is this” to decide between donation opportunities I recommend
I agree reasoning about uncertainty is crucial. If your EV isn’t sensitive to the probability and magnitude of tail outcomes, you’re doing EV estimation wrong.
I think EV should be in units of utils or something, such that you’re risk neutral in EV.
When I said “Using distributions is dangerous” I think I meant to claim: often people would do better to think discretely, considering a few different scenarios, rather than trying to draw a distribution. I think sometimes people are able to reason well about uncertainty with a few discrete buckets but instead they draw a distribution (perhaps because Squiggle leads them to?) and reasoning about distributions is tough. Including me! I think in many contexts I’d produce a better EV estimate by putting probabilities and values on several discrete buckets and summing the products than by trying to draw a continuous distribution and then taking its expectation. If I had to draw a continuous distribution, I’d often start with the discrete buckets and then draw a distribution to approximate them!
Also sometimes the EV you assign a parameter is upstream of your distribution for that parameter, and in such cases there’s no need to draw a distribution if your goal is just an EV estimate.
Some variables—election outcomes, AI timelines—are very amenable to distributions. But trying to draw a distribution for value produced by a project is rough.
if you’re voting in an election where one candidate has a 6% edge, your vote has roughly a 1 in 12 chance of changing the outcome!
This is mostly false! You have to think about σ. If two candidates are tied ex ante, that doesn’t mean your vote is infinitely powerful. The crucial question is probability that your vote will flip the election. And on your particular example, maybe you’d have a ~1/12 chance of flipping the election if your candidate’s vote margin was a random number between −0 and −12, but “your candidate is expected to lose by 12 votes” is lower tractability than that because there’s a 50% chance your candidate will lose by more than 12 votes, and there’s some chance that they’ll win without you, and the crucial −0 scenario is less likely than the −12 scenario.
the per-person impact is about the same.
No, people are affected more by the federal government than their local government. The federal government matters more than all local governments combined. But federal vs local government is not relevant to this post so I don’t want to get into it.
I don’t really have thoughts on this.
Most distributions are independent. E.g. the parameters in the BOTECs here.
Sometimes parameters are obviously correlated. E.g. “Congress wants to do good AI safety stuff” and “the president wants to do good AI safety stuff,” or “vote margin in the 2026 CO-08 election” and “seat margin in the House after the 2026 elections.”
You can just multiply point estimates (if you only care about EV)
Good point; I agree small opportunities can be great.
how do you manage these, both in terms of filtering and finding them, and managing the relatively very high overhead costs for them?
This post is more like I have a priori observations than I know what processes work well in practice. I don’t claim the latter. But since you asked:
I don’t do a good job of finding small opportunities. When small opportunities come to my attention, my process is something like:
(If it’s out-of-scope of my expertise, drop it, unless an advisor is strongly vouching for it or it seems truly amazing or something.)
Do I have a great sense of how good it is, in particular because it’s just a small version of something I’ve investigated in the past? If so, use that.
Otherwise, is there someone else who should decide? If so, get them to decide.
Otherwise, are there positive second-order effects to actually investigating (e.g. maybe noticing or being able to evaluate many more opportunities like this)? If so, do that.
Otherwise, try to make a decision quickly. If downside risk is low and upside is maybe-great, then make the grant.
Er, that’s conflating “small grant” with “low-stakes.” Sometimes the amount of money is small but the opportunity is high-stakes — sometimes the upside is high; sometimes there are costs or downside risks much greater than the cost of the money. It’s the low-stakes opportunities that you want to decide quickly on.
An abbreviated heuristic is: if it’s in-scope and it seems great and it’s hard to imagine regretting it substantially more than if you lit the money on fire, just fund all such small opportunities. Funding lots of small opportunities is better than funding few.
Note that being exploitable has downsides beyond wasting money. (Internet people reading this, please don’t ask me for money because you read this; I’m very unlikely to give you money even for good things because my expertise is limited to a small fraction of good things.)
Probably in my domain relative to yours, (1) there’s way fewer small one-off opportunities and (2) a greater fraction of them have substantial downside risk.
For people following my daily posting: I have two more posts in me that I really want to write decently well: donations are super important and the US government is super important. The latter is particularly tricky — for one thing, most people say they already agree; there’s confusing inconsistencies in people’s current attitudes that I want to untangle. Anyway, today’s post and several future posts will be shorter and less important, to give me more time to write those two.
Ah, now I like it 🙂