Category Archives: Altruism

Dear liberal American friends: please pair readings of liberal media with viewings of Fox news or other conservative media on the same topics. This will take work. They will say things you disagree with, using words you are unfamiliar with. You’ll have to stop scrolling down on Facebook and actively google phrases like “Trump executive order to protect America.” That may sound hard, but the integrity of your country depends on you doing it.

You’ve probably heard about the President’s executive order restricting immigration from seven countries, which lead to the mistreatment of legal visa holders and permanent residents of the United States in Airports. You probably also understand that there is a huge difference between ruling out new visas from those countries, and dishonoring existing ones. The latter is breaking a promise. Dishonoring agreements like that makes you untrustworthy, and that is very bad for cooperation. Right?

Well, hear this. Continue reading →

I think donating to charity is great, especially if you make more than \$100k per year, placing you well past the threshold where your well-being depends heavily on income (somewhere around \$70k, depending on who does the analysis). I’ve been in that boat before, and donated more than 100% of my disposable income to charity. However, I was also particularly well-positioned to know where money should go at that time, which made donating particularly worth doing. I haven’t made any kind of official pledge to always donate money, because I take pledges/promises very seriously, and for me personally, taking such a pledge seems like a bad idea, even accounting for its signalling value. I’m writing this blog post mainly as a way to reduce social pressure among such folks who earn less than \$100k per year to produce donations, while at the same time encouraging folks who earn more to consider donating more seriously.

(Share this post to encourage folks with rational, altruistic leanings to vote more. I originally posted this to LessWrong in 2012, but I figured it was worth re-posting.)

Summary:  It’s often argued that voting is irrational, because the probability of affecting the outcome is so small. But the outcome itself is extremely large when you consider its impact on other people. I estimate that for most people, voting is worth a charitable donation of somewhere between \$100 and \$1.5 million. For me, the value came out to around \$56,000.  So I figure something on the order of \$1000 is a reasonable evaluation (after all, I’m writing this post because the number turned out to be large according to this method, so regression to the mean suggests I err on the conservative side), and that’s big enough to make me do it.

Moreover, in swing states the value is much higher, so taking a 10% chance at convincing a friend in a swing state to vote similarly to you is probably worth thousands of expected donation dollars, too. (This is an important move to consider if you’re in a fairly robustly red-or-blue state like New York, California, or Texas where Gelman et al estimate that “the probability of a decisive vote is closer to 1 in a billion.”) I find EV calculations like this for voting or vote-trading to be much more compelling than the typical attempts to justify voting purely in terms of signal value or the resulting sense of pride in fulfilling a civic duty.

Selfish voting is a waste of your time

Sometimes the world needs you to think new thoughts. It’s good to be humble, but having low subjective credence in a conclusion is just one way people implement humility; another way is to feel unentitled to form your own belief in the first place, except by copying an “expert authority”. This is especially bad when there essentially are no experts yet — e.g. regarding the nascent sciences of existential risks — and the world really needs people to just start figuring stuff out. Continue reading →

There are surprisingly many impediments to becoming comfortable making personal use of subjective probabilities, or “credences”: some conceptual, some intuitive, and some social. However, Phillip Tetlock has found that thinking in probabilities is essential to being a Superforcaster, so it is perhaps a skill and tendency worth cultivating on purpose. Continue reading →

Summary: Since I offered to answer questions about my pledge to donate 10% of my annual salary to CFAR as an existential risk reduction, the question “Why doesn’t CFAR do something that will scale faster than workshops?” keeps coming up, so I’m answering it here. Continue reading →

Summary: Develop an allergy to saying “Will anyone do X?”. Instead query for more specific error signals: Continue reading →