Open thread, Oct. 20 - Oct. 26, 2014

Possibly donating money is easier when it's funging against luxuries than when it's funging against early retirement, and it's hard for people who don't plan on retiring early to read and follow frugality advice that's framed in terms of how much better financial independence is than whichever luxury?

This is a question that's been bothering me for some months as well, ever since I encountered Early Retirement Extreme a few months ago.

We here in Vancouver have substantial overlap between the meetups for Mr. Money Mustache, effective altruism, rationality, and life extension. It's weird, because there's about a dozen people who are all friends, so we go to each other's meetups lots.

Anyway, much of what the effective altruism community is comes from what was popular in its precursor communities. Less Wrong, academia, and the non-profit world don't all focus on the early retirement movement. If frugality isn't a value in effective altruism lifestyles yet, then let's see if we can't make that happen.

Are you asking why EAs aren't more concerned with frugality?

Probably because it's largely composed of or at least represented by the kind of people who REALLY like living in places like NYC and the Bay Area, which are the opposite of frugal.

In regards to early retirement, there's something of an obsession with maximizing productivity as well as earning to give, both of which run counter to retirement.

Thanks for the link. I had not heard of that site, but I really enjoy it.

It's new, but it seems worth mentioning Rationalist Tutor specifically out of the tumblrs for newbies.

As a newbie around here: thank you, this is quite helpful.

I got more side effects when I took it regularly as opposed to taking it every now and then. Headaches and so on.

If you did this as a case study or thought experiment, and published this as a discussion post, that would be swell. Similar articles are written by other users of Less Wrong, and they're usually well-appreciated efforts, as far as I can tell. Your three questions are a good starting point, so I might write this as a post myself. Alternatively, if it's not worthy of it's own post, anyone doing this exercise on/for themselves should definitely share it in the (group) rationality diary.

People who look for ways to become more rational are probably far more rational than average already.

I usually don't use the term "rational"/"rationality" that much, and would rather talk about things like "being effective at what you care about".

I expect this is mainly a disagreement about definitions? Many people think of "rationality" as referring to system-2 type thinking specifically, which isn't universally applicable and wouldn't actually be the best approach in many situations. Whereas the LessWrong definition is that Rationality is Systematized Winning, which may call for intuition and system-1 at times, depending on what the best approach actually is. With that definition given, I don't think selling "rationality" to people is something that needs to be done - they might then start dismissing the particular rationality technique you're trying to get them to use as "irrational", but presumably you're ready for that argument.

I think this is very important, I myself noticed that when I was younger, the longer I was unemployed, the more I started reading about socialist ideas and getting into politics. Then when I started working again it went out the window and I moved on to learning about other things.

Similarly, maybe I'm here because I just happened to be in the mood to read some fan fiction that day?

When explaining/arguing for rationality with the non-rational types, I have to resort to non-rational arguments. This makes me feel vaguely dirty, but it's also the only way I know of to argue with people who don't necessarily value evidence in their decision making. Unsurprisingly, many of the rationalists I know are unenthused by these discussions and frequently avoid them because they're unpleasant. It follows that the first step is to stop avoiding arguments/discussions with people of alternate value systems, which is really just a good idea anyway.

Got me thinking, what actually turns someone into a rationality fan?

I feel better about my actions when I can justify them with arguments.

But to be honest, I have never met someone who regards rationality as not worthwhile. Or maybe I have just forgotten the experience.

Let's see how basic I can go with an argument for rationality without using anything that needs rationality to explain. First the basic form:

Rationality is an effective way of figuring out what is and isn't true. Therefore rational people end up knowing the truth more often. Knowing the truth more often helps you make plans that work. Plans that work allow you to acquire money/status/power/men/women/happiness.

Now to dress it up in some rhetoric:

My friend, have you ever wished you could be the best you? The one who knows the best way to do everything, cuts to the truth of the matter, saves the world and then gets the girl/wins the man? That's what Rationalism looks like, but first one must study the nature of truth in order to cleave reality along its weaknesses and then bend it to your whims. You can learn the art a step stronger than science, the way that achieves the seemingly impossible. You can build yourself into that best you, a step at a time, idea upon idea until you look down the mountain you have climbed and know you have won.

There, I feel vaguely oily. Points out of 10?

So we have lots of guides on how to be rational...

Do we? I don't think that's the case. We know that being rational is quite hard and we don't have a good guide to circumvent most cognitive biases.

Recently I was talking to someone and realised they didn't accept that a rational approach was always the best one

You don't have to go very far for that viewpoint. Robin Hanson did voice it lately.

Got me thinking, what actually turns someone into a rationality fan?

To me that label rather rings alarm bells than any positive associations. Being a fan is something quite different than actually being rational.

There are also lots of guides on how to be fit. Can we find out and learn from what makes a person decide to pursue fitness?

Salame and Baddeley (1989): Music impairs short-term memory performance, vocal moreso than instrumental.

Jones and Macken (1993) [pdf] has things to say.

Anecdotally, I have much more trouble writing if I don't have music on. And I frequently listen to musicals.

(Things I write while listening to musicals: email, blog posts, my book).

* Office, no music: ___   5.4 (10.5hr)
* Office, instrumental:  5.8 (21.5hr)
* Office, vocal: ______ 5.9 (20hr)
* Library, no music  ___    4.2 (5.5hr)
* Home, instrumental  __  5.3 (23hr)
* Home, vocal _________   5.5 (21.5hr)

The people at Focus At Will use instrumental music with certain qualities to "habituate" the listener to improve focus.

(more details)

They have a ton of references, which may help in your search.

This isn't really my area, I just use the service and it seems to help --- at the very least, it acts as a trigger for me to enter a "time to do work" mode.

Thanks to both zedzed and Troubadour for helping confirm what I hoped would not be confirmed. Time to turn off Metallica at work.

Focus@Will seems interesting. I downloaded the app and am giving it a try. Its a little hard to figure out what they are saying the increase in focus might be. Still, it is just 5%, that's enough to pay their annual subscription.

Max L.

It happens to me. Music with lyrics makes my reading/writing less efficient.

I've heard this effect mentioned several times, but if it applies to me is not strong enough to be obvious. (Then again, it's not like I tried to test it statistically.)

Possibly, at certain times of the day music might make me more productive, by making it easier for me to stay awake.

(OTOH if I listen to music while concentrating on something else I usually can't remember any of the lyrics afterwards.)

I remember that there are studies that show that music impears cognitive tasks (at least learning related). But I can't name them off the top of my head. If you are lucky I will come back with the refs later.

I'd bet gwern can provide better refs too.

I keep thinking about the relations between machine learning and human learning, esp. teaching children a lot. Basically all results in one field carry over to some degree to the other. Some things only apply on the neuronal level. Others only in very specific settings.

Some random pages to follow: http://lesswrong.com/lw/jol/rethinking_education/ Vygotsky's http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zone_of_proximal_development

Does anybody have experiences of getting rid of them?

As mentioned by btrettel, I had some a few months ago that, as far as I can tell, were totally wiped out by one thermal remediation, which seems to be the mirror of hyporational's suggestion. Basically, they heated up the apartment enough that all the bedbugs and their eggs died, and this took ~8 hours and was expensive. I found the extermination company on Yelp.

I have several bookshelves with lots of books, and the bedbugs apparently like to crawl all over the place--there was a husk at the corner between the wall and the ceiling--and so the exterminator was pretty insistent that I go with the thermal remediation (which would kill them everywhere) instead of using pesticides, which would have to be applied everywhere to be as effective.

People in Finland freeze their sheets and mattresses in the winter and it seems to do the trick. I'm not sure if this helps you now unless you have a huge freezer.

Sympathies.

In my case, spraying all over the room several times got them down to a tolerable level. By tolerable I mean that I was sleeping with no duvet or pillow so that they would have nowhere near me to hide, and often performing less-thorough sprays, and as far as I could tell, I wasn't getting bitten any more - so given several months, they would have just died off. I was still seeing one or two a week, though, and the spray probably wasn't too good for my health. That lasted maybe a month or so, then my landlord decided to just replace the bed, and I think I only saw one after that. (I've since moved out.)

Vaniver does. Might want to message him about it.

I've heard this idea before, and it has never seemed convincing. Suppose you managed to record one useful bit per second, 24/7, for thirty years. That's approximately one billion bits. There are approximately 100 billion neurons, each with many synapses. How many polynomials of degree n can fit m points for n>m? Infinity many.

Its actually worse than this, because even if you record orders or magnitude more data than the brain contains, perhaps by recording speech and video, then maybe you could recreate the speech and movement centres of the brain with some degree of accuracy, but not recover other areas that seem more fundamental to your identity, because the information is not evenly distributed.

Its easy to get into a 'happy death spiral' around superintelligence, but even godlike entities cannot do things which are simply impossible.

I suppose it might be worth recording information about yourself on the basis of low cost and a small chance of astronomically large payoff, and regardless it could be useful for data mining or interesting for future historians. But I can't see that it has anywhere near the chance of success of cryonics.

Incidentally, a plastinisied brain could be put in a box and buried in a random location and survive for a long time, especially in Antarctica.

It doesn't seem that it would be beyond a superintelligent AI to reconstruct my mind from this data.

A superintelligent AI still suffer from Garbage In/Garbage out. It depends how good you consider a replication of you to have to be to be you.

From the perspective of a superintelligent AI the AI also might consider it to be an ethical obligation to reanimate cryopreserved people but not consider it to be an obligation to reconstruct people based on data.

The comments on http://lesswrong.com/lw/1ay/is_cryonics_necessary_writing_yourself_into_the/ might be worth reading on the issue.

I considered training a simple AI in mimicking my cognitive habits and responses. The simplest form would be a chat-bot trained on all my spoken and written words. Archiving lots of audios/videos could also help.

If true cryonics would still offer the advantage of strongly signaling that you wanted to be brought back, and putting you into a community committed to bringing back members of the community.

A more extreme version of what you suggest is that a future friendly super intelligence might bring to life every possible human mind that wanted to exist.

If the entire internet were backed up in this way, that might be a lot of people effectively preserved.

Thoughts?

I think it has as much chance of success as the ancient Egyptians' practice of mummification.

Mentioning the possibility of my mind being recreated by a superintelligence after my death, you had my curiosity[1], but with 'drawing pretty graphs' you have my attention. I want to draw pretty graphs about my activity too. How do you do this? I want to do it for and to myself. Feel free to send me a PM about it, if you don't want to continue the conversation here.

[1] gwern's comment below in the parallel child thread helped.

If the entire internet were backed up in this way, that might be a lot of people effectively preserved.

Thoughts?

I think it has about as much chance of success as the ancient Egyptians' practice of mummification.

Holden Karnofsky of Givewell discusses some of this in his EA summit talk. There's no simple answer, but a short one is "get big". Near as I can tell, the best way to do this is develop rare and valuable skills that interest you, a la So Good They Can't Ignore You.

Personally, I think math and computer science are good places to start. Both are rare and valuable (especially taken together). If you have aptitude and interest (as I estimate you do), start there. For math, step 1 is to get through calculus. You'll get different opinions for CS; I'm personally a fan of SICP, but that assumes calculus. Fortunately, we've compiled a list of programming resources.

And then things that strike your interest. I'm learning psychology, writing, and economics, not because I think they're the rarest or most valuable skills, but because they're at least somewhat uncommon and at least somewhat valuable and I really enjoy learning them, and the combination of math/CS/psych/writing/econ is sufficiently novel that I should be able to do useful things that wouldn't happen otherwise. Holden discusses reasons for choosing things that interest you/things you have aptitude for, rather than the most tractable problem, in the video linked above.

Good luck!

If you look at the give well job description for a research analyst (http://www.givewell.org/about/jobs/research-analyst) it doesn't mention that GiveWell is interested that people who apply have a degree.

If that's where you want to go applying directly to GiveWell would be the straightforward course of action.

Given FHI's academic nature they probably do prefer people with degrees but I think FHI doesn't want specific degrees but wants to hire people with expertise that they currently don't have so they should be pretty open.

Can "research" include heavy math?

Do you have a mechanism for trusted third-parties to audit (not necessarily publicly) your adherence to your vow? If not, your should consider it. Similarly: I won't post, comment, or tweet on Facebook or Twitter between October 6th and the end of the year.

Why? That seems like an odd vow.

If you don't tell us (sorry possibly too late), we aren't likely to find out, unless your alternate account is so obnoxious that it gets investigated. In this community, that's a damned high threshold.

Seriously, I don't think it's a problem. Nobody objected to Clippy probably being a regular member, though there were efforts to find out who it was out of curiosity.

Depending on your use case, you might also just want to use this account (for which the password is 'password').

I think there is nothing wrong with using something upfront and obvious like throwaway_. Or any other name, as long as you preface your question with "this is a throwaway", as is common on Reddit.

I think the case law on the issue is that, nobody speaks up when people do this and mark it specifically.

On the other hand do not use both accounts within one discussion. Don't use both accounts to vote on the same thread.

Given that you have written the thread, it's however likely a bad idea for you to start a more anonymous account right now ;) if you care about keeping secrets from people on LW and not only the casual browser.

I've done the reverse: created an account for when I do need to discuss things associated with my name, like "I wrote this post elsewhere that...."

You may recall I had a previous user account not linked to my real name: eggman. I started using one with my real name since I intend to post to Less Wrong and the effective altruism forum more frequently in the future, and it works better to have both accounts linked to my name if people want to contact me. Since I already happen to have access to two accounts, I was thinking of using 'eggman' for the same purposes. Now, obviously, I've just stated I was, or am, eggman, or whatever. So, it isn't anonymous anymore. However, it's more anonymous, as it doesn't use the same name that's on my government-issued I.D.

More than using it because I don't want other users on Less Wrong to know it's me, I might not want it searchable, or linked to me public identity, for others off of Less Wrong.

So, I consider this acceptable.

If you want to make it more acceptable...

• Consider stating with the profile, or at the beginning of each comment, that you're a regular user of Less Wrong who is using an anonymous sockpuppet account not because you want to troll, but because you don't want your name linked to discussiong more controversial topics. I believe the genuine merit of how you discuss such topics would quickly dismiss speculation that you are just a troll.

• If you don't do the above, and never express that the anonymous account you're using is used by a regular user of Less Wrong going under their real name, none of us would actually tell. We wouldn't know you had two accounts. I'd be surprised if someone is such an inquisitor that they snoop profiles to ensure someone made a credible introduction of themselves in a welcome thread, and reports them to a moderator if they don't.

• If the topics you'd be discussing on Less Wrong are controversial among the Less Wrong community itself, that might be another matter. That might be playing with fire, and in that case I'd just caution you be more careful, lest you cause harm to Less Wrong as a discussion board.

I can empathize to an extent - my fiance left me about two months ago (two months ago yesterday actually, now that I check). I still love her, and I'm not even close to getting over her. I don't think I'm even close to wanting to get over her. And when I have talked to her since it happened, I've said things that I wish I hadn't said, upon reflection. I know exactly what you mean about having no control of what you say around her.

But, with that being said...

Well, I certainly can't speak for the common wisdom of the community, but speaking for myself, I think it's important to remember that emotion and rationality aren't necessarily opposed - in fact, I think that's one of the most important things I've learned from LW: emotion is orthogonal to rationality. I think of the love I have for my ex-fiance, and, well...I approve of it. It can't be really be justified in any way (and it's hard to even imagine what it would mean for an emotion to be justified, except by other emotions), but it's there, and I'm happy that it is. As Eliezer put it, there's no truth that destroys my love.

Of course, emotions can be irrational - certainly one has to strive for reflective equilibrium, searching for emotions that conflict with one another and deciding which ones to endorse. And it seems like you don't particularly endorse the emotions that you feel around this person (I'll just add that for myself, being in love has never felt like another persons values were superseding my own - rather it felt like they were being elevated to being on par with my own. Suddenly this other person's happiness was just as important to me as my own - usually not more important, though). But I guess my point is that there's nothing inherently irrational about valuing someone else over yourself, even if it might be irrational for you.

The question "is heartbreak the way humans experience it right now a good thing" is one of the more complex questions about the human condition,yes. My mental modell of all that is kinda like the following:

On an neurochemical level, the way "love" stimulates the reward-centers has been likened to "cocaine".Its an extremely strong conditioning, addiction even. So of course your brain wants to satisfy that condition by all means possible. If we have a look at popular culture, its kinda expected to have extreme reactions to heartbreak: people fall into depression, start rationalizing all kinds of really crazy behaviour (stalking, death threats, lifechanging roadtrips) etc etc.

To avoid all that you have to thoroughly impress on your emotional side that its over: thats why some people do the whole "burn everything that connects me with her", others just overwrite that old emotion with new (irrational)emotions like anger, hold a symbolic funeral, repeat it to youself everyday in a mirror etc.

Unfortunately I am not aware of studies about optimal treatment of heartbreak, but common wisdom is: NO contact at all in the beginning, allow yourself to grieve, find solace with friends/familiy, and somehow redefine your sense of selfesteem- take up painting/coding/comething you have always wanted to do. If one wanted to go the rational route: research neurochemistry, find out wether its really like cocaine-addiction, do whatever helps with cocaine-withdrawal. (or the other most closely related drug-withdrawal).

You can write down your own goals to make them clearer to you. If you are clear about what you want to do it's harder for someone else to give you other goals then when you are empty.

There are various kind of things you can do to learn emotional control. I remember times in the past where strong emotions could cloud my mind but after doing a lot of meditation that's not true for me anymore. In the absence of ugh-fields or a lot of unknowns strong emotions make me think clearly and I can still follow rules based heuristics.

The most charged emotional situation I can think of that likely would have freaked a lot of people out was when it was past midnight and I was walking alone and a guy grabbed me and told me: "Give me 5 Euros or I'll kill you"

To get to something more speculative, I have the idea that love is a lot of conditioning. If everytime you think about X, you feel good, the next time you think about X you will feel even more good. A bit unpredictability thrown in generally increases the effect.

If you repeat that a thousand times you get a pretty strong stimulus. Almost wireheading ;)

Of course there are additional effects that comes with physical intimacy. Speaking about them would be even more speculative.

What is the common wisdom in this community? How does one deal with this kind of extreme emotion?

It's not great data, but I recall an analogous discussion on Less Wrong several months ago.

I participated in the discussion of a post covering subject matter similar to what you're thinking about: is love a good idea?. It seems to me the original poster was trying to make something like a hypothetical apostasy of falling in love, with mixed results. I had a lot of sympathy for him, as trying to become a rational apostate of 'falling in love' seems a challenge fraught with pitfalls, and yet one somebody might find tempting to pursue such a path after having love rend one's emotions so. The original poster admitted he hadn't been in a relationship as significant as, for example, yours, so there might be limited value in that perspective. Still, I feel like the rest of us were able to clarify his somewhat muddled thinking in the comments, so you might find solace there. Additionally, you might feel like sending some participant in that discussion a private message if what they wrote reaches out to you.

I'm fairly well-informed on this subject- I've had one published science fiction author as a housemate, another as a good friend, and I'm on a first-name basis with multiple editors at Tor.

You will find it very challenging to get direct feedback from any professionals in the industry at this stage, short of relationships like personal friendship. This is because at any given time, there are tens of thousands of unpromising authors making exactly that request.

If this is your first novel, or even your third, don't expect too much. The bar for minimum quality is extremely high, and author skill does not peak at a young age. If you're still early in the process, and you're still enjoying the practice, keep writing your second and third and eighth books while you look around for your first to be published. As a general rule of thumb, if you don't have a novel that's now vaguely embarrassing to you, then you probably aren't good enough yet. Do not put all your eggs in one basket by writing one very long series; try out a variety of settings, and experiment with your craft.

Often, it is heard that writing short stories to build up a reputation first is a good way to break in to the industry. This is false.

Be aware that no matter which route you take, multiple years will pass before your book is accepted. Be aware that when your first book is published, you will not be paid enough to live on.

Rather than chasing publishers immediately, the first thing you need (need) is a good agent. Being accepted by an agent is a kind of 'slush pile lite' challenge- agents usually have their own slush piles and their own interns to read through them, but their overall volume and turnaround time is much more manageable. You're also much more likely to get real feedback from an agent, explaining any potential problems that they see with your work. Another advantage of having multiple novels written is that you can send a particular novel to a particular agent, depending on their stated preferences. These can be quite specialized- gay and lesbian characters in fantasy settings, hard sf alternate history military adventures- depending on the goals of the agent in question, and it helps to maximize the number of niches that you accidentally fall in to by writing a variety of stories. Make sure that you are aware of your chosen agent's reputation, since there are predatory impostors. Once you have this agent, you will be able to bypass the publisher's slush pile entirely, and your chances improve dramatically.

May I suggest talking to scifi/fantasy author community (they know quite a bit about this, and often struggle to publish). Like piloting and academia, demand for these sorts of jobs far outstrips supply, so most people will struggle and make a poor living.

If you haven't yet, read http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/04/common-misconceptions-about-pu-1.html by Charles Stross.Quite a good description of how book publishing works.

Is there a good reason to go through a publisher these days? At least assuming that you're not certain you'll get a big publisher who's really enthusiastic about marketing you?

Yes, if you manage to find a publisher they'll get your book in bookstores and maybe do some marketing for you if you're lucky, but as others in the thread have indicated, getting through the process and into print may take years - and unless you manage to get a big publisher who's really invested in your book, the amount of extra publicity you're likely to get that way will be quite limited.

Instead you could put your books up on Amazon as Kindle and CreateSpace versions: one author reports that on a per-unit basis, he makes three times more money from a directly published ebook priced at $2.99 than he would from a $7.99 paperback sold through a publisher, and almost as much as he would from a $25 hardcover. When you also take into account the fact that it's a lot easier to get people to buy a $3 book than a $25 or even a $8 book, his total income will be much higher. As a bonus, he gets to keep full rights to his work and do whatever he wants with them. Also they can be on sale for the whole time that one would otherwise have spent looking for a publisher.

One fun blog post speculates that the first book to earn its author a billion dollars will be self-published ebook. Of course you're not very likely to earn a billion dollars, but the same principles apply for why it's useful to publish one's work that way in general:

Prediction #1: The first B-book will be an e-book.

The reason is that you can’t have great sales without great distribution. There are roughly a billion computers on the planet connected to the internet and all of them can read e-books in numerous formats using free software. There are roughly four billion mobile devices, and most of those will soon be able to read e-books.

The sales channel for e-books is growing rapidly and has global reach. That’s why the first B-book will be in e-format. [...]

Prediction #2: The first B-book will be self-published.

Self-publishing is the best way to get the royalty rate high enough and the retail price low enough to make the B-book a reality.

The fact is that most publishers aren’t going to price your e-book at $2.99 or $3.99. They’ll want it at $9.99 or $12.99, which is probably too high for the market. And they’ll pay you only 25% royalties on the wholesale price, which is too low. If you want an aggressively priced e-book and a high royalty rate, you’ll almost certainly need to publish it yourself.

I feel like if you want money, you should go for self-publishing. If you're more interested in getting a lot of readers, you should again go for self-publishing. Of course the most likely outcome for any book is that you won't get much of either, but at least self-publishing gives you better odds than a traditional publisher. (Again, with a possible exception for the case where you get a big publisher to put up a massive marketing campaign for you.)

The first question a publisher asks is "what shelf would it go on in the book store?"

Basically because no one that you showed the manuscript thinks he can make money with it.

Manuscripts often get rejected by a bunch of publishers till one wants to publish it. On the other hand few publisher have an idea that they want to publish a RationalFic.

Um - which one, precisely? I might want to read it.

Depends on what you want to do, if you want to keep your google doc formatting (including which lines are title, bulleted lists, links, etc.) then your result will probably look weird and ugly on lesswrong.

The best would be to copy-paste from google doc but to paste with Ctrl-shift-V (or equivalent), which in most browsers pastes the raw text, and then redoing the necessary formatting in the LW article editor. This will be a bit of a pain for links, bolded/italics parts, quotes, etc. since you'll have to redo them (so it's best not to do them in the first place in google docs).

Is that where those weirdly-formatted articles are coming from?

When I want to copy and paste without accidentally keeping the formatting, I paste it into a text editor and copy it again from there.

What are the problems that motivate you to ask this question? Formatting errors? Repetitive strain injury from clicking?

Only acknowledgment:

http://lesswrong.com/lw/o4/leave_a_line_of_retreat/

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i9/the_importance_of_saying_oops/

The Sin of Underconfidence seems relevant, although it takes a slightly different angle on the topic.

Disclosure: I made a $1000 unrestricted donation to Givewell in June 2014.

Givewell's donation portal allows you to donate to any of their three currently top recommended charities, or to donate to Givewell directly. If donating to Givewell directly one of two things can happen.

i) You make a donation which restricts Givewell to allotting that money to one of it's top recommended charities as it sees fit to have the financial needs of those organizations met.

ii) You make an unrestricted donation, which allows Givewell to use your donation to support its own operating cost. Since Givewell apparently receives sufficient funding to do their typical work, your donation, i.e., the marginal dollar, effectively funds the Open Philanthropy Project, formerly Givewell Labs. This is Givewell's joint investigative research venture with Good Ventures, a foundation worth hundreds of millions of dollars; their research right now is into global catastrophic risks, policy reform, and improving scientific research. This is the ambitious research the rationality community looks forward toward, and was profiled as such by Holden Karnofsky at the 2014 Effective Altruism Summit.

GiveWell does some of this work of evaluating charities, but if everyone was donating to GiveWell instead of some to other charities I am sure those other causes would suffer quite some.

Following the Kantian maxim isn't good in this case. In effective altruism there's a concept called "room for funding". If you would have 10 billion $ and seek a target, GiveWell wouldn't be able to use that money as effectively as it uses a marginal dollar at the moment.

At the present moment simply going with GiveWell is a good option if you don't want to spend much time. They provide you with proven courses that can put your money to good use.

It's also possible that you see something in your community that would be done if there funding but nobody stepped up to pay the bill. Paying for a entry on meetup.com for a local effective altruism group might be an example of that category.

duplicate triplicate

There seems to be an effort underway to get the sequences into a book format which includes an editor going over everything.
http://lesswrong.com/lw/h7t/help_us_name_the_sequences_ebook/
http://lesswrong.com/lw/jc7/karma_awards_for_proofreaders_of_the_less_wrong/

The quality of the project is likely higher than someone doing $100 of work to compile a book for Lulu.

The core dilemma is whether it's worthwhile to wait for that project to come to a conclusion or whether it's better to create a separate version from the one MIRI is working. The sequences are licensed as CC-by so there nothing stopping anybody from making a book out of them.

And of course if not being on dead trees was a principled decision I respect that.

I highly doubt that. For the kind of ethical framework that Eliezer presents such a decision would be strange.

I couldn't finish it.

Then why do you post the link to it?

Steve Fuller writes a wrongheaded fuzzyminded self-indulgent article full of bloviating wankery. Also in today's news: Thomas Keller cooks a tasty meal, Bill Gates gives some money to charity, and a Republican congressman criticizes Barack Obama.

Increase the probability-weighted average of your utility function over Everett branches.