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Recently some friends and I were comparing growing the pie interventions to an increasing our friends' share of the pie intervention, and at first we mostly missed some general considerations against the latter type. 1. Decision-theoretic considerations > The world is full of people with different values working towards their...
Superintelligence, pp. 122–3. 2014. Consider a technologically mature civilization capable of building sophisticated von Neumann probes of the kind discussed in the text. If these can travel at 50% of the speed of light, they can reach some stars before the cosmic expansion puts further acquisitions forever out of reach....
Prospective donors often ask how cost-effective my team's various recommendations are — they want to donate to the most cost-effective opportunity. But the answer is often roughly: > If we do our job right, then all donations we recommend to you are equally valuable on the margin, and that value...
Many people think you need probability distributions; they think using point estimates will mess up your EV calculations. That's false; you'll get the same result whether you multiply distributions or multiply their EVs. You can ask a chatbot: "Briefly explain linearity of expectation and independence (E[XY] = E[X]E[Y])." To multiply...
Some professionals get this wrong. You should use three parameters: A. Goodness if your preferred candidate wins rather than loses B. Probability that one vote for your candidate would flip the election C. Cost per vote Then cost-effectiveness is A*B/C. I'm only really going to discuss B in this post....
It feels like the grantmaking around me is only partially moneyball-pilled, or it's only somewhat competent at moneyball. There's alpha in putting numbers on stuff, if you can do it right. Five months ago I wanted to compare a bunch of different kinds of donation opportunities. I needed a universal...
Written to a new grantmaker. The first three points are the most important. Focus on opportunities many times your bar. Most value comes from finding/creating projects many times your bar, rather than discriminating between opportunities around your bar. If you find/create a new opportunity to donate $1M at 10x your...