2024-12-23 21:00:00
I was recently talking to someone who had recently started thinking about effective altruism, and was trying to figure out how to work it into their life. They were established in their career, it paid well, and their background wasn't obviously a good fit for direct work, so they were naturally considering earning to give. This prompts a question of how much to give.
"How much?" is a question people have struggled with for a very long time. Donating 10% of income has a long history, and it's common for EAs to pledge to do this; donating 2.5% of wealth is also traditional. If you're earning to give, however, you might want to give more: Julia and I have been giving 50%; Allan Saldanha has been giving 75% since 2019. How should one decide?
I was hoping there were good EA blog posts on this topic, but after spending a while with EA Forum search and Google I didn't find any. Claude kept telling me I should check out Jeff Kaufman's blog, but all I found was a rough post from 2011. So here's an attempt that I think is better than my old post, but still not great.
While EAs talk a lot about principles, I think this is fundamentally a pragmatic question. I find the scale of the world's problems overwhelming; no one has enough money to eliminate poverty, disease, or the risk we make ourselves extinct. This is not to say donations don't matter—there are a lot of excellent options for making the world better—but there's not going to be a point where I'm going to be satisfied and say "Good! That's done now." This gives a strong intellectual pull to donate to the point where donating another dollar would start to decrease my altruistic impact, by interfering in my work; burning out does not maximize your impact!
In the other direction, I'm not fully altruistic. I like some amount of comfort, there are fun things I want to do, and I want my family to have good lives. I'm willing to go pretty far in the altruism direction (I donate 50% and took a 75% pay cut to do more valuable work) but it's a matter of balance.
Which means the main advice I have is to give yourself the information you need to make a balanced choice. I'd recommend making a few different budgets: how would your life look if you gave 5%? 10%? 20%? In figuring out where you'd cut it might be helpful to ignore the donation aspect: how would your budget change if your industry started doing poorly?
In some ways Julia and I had this easy: we got into these ideas when we were just starting out and living cheaply, while we could still be careful about which luxuries to adopt and maintain inexpensive tastes. It's much harder to cut back! So another thing I'd recommend, especially if you haven't yet reached peak earning years, is to plan to donate a disproportionately large fraction of pay increases. For example, 10% of your (inflation adjusted!) 2024 salary plus 50% of any amount over that.
Overall, the goal is to find a level where you feel good about your donations but are also still keeping enough to thrive. This is a very personal question, and people land in a bunch of different places. But wherever you do end up, I'm glad to be working with you.
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2024-12-22 21:00:00
An incredibly productive way of working with the world is to reduce a complex question to something that can be modeled mathematically and then do the math. The most common way this can fail, however, is when your model is missing important properties of the real world.
Consider insurance: there's some event with probability X% under which you'd be out $Y, you want to maximize the logarithm of your wealth, and your current wealth is $Z. Under this model, you can calculate (more) the most you should be willing to pay to insure against this.
This is a nice application of the Kelly criterion, though whether maximizing log wealth is a good goal is arguable (ex: bankruptcy is not infinitely bad, the definition of 'wealth' for this purpose is tricky). But another one thing it misses is that many things we call "insurance" have important properties that diverge from this model:
There can be a collective bargaining component. For example, health insurance generally includes a network of providers who have agreed to lower rates. Even if your bankroll were as large as the insurance company's, this could still make taking insurance worth it for access to their negotiated rates.
An insurance company is often better suited to learn about how to avoid risks than individuals. My homeowner's insurance company requires various things to reduce their risk: maybe I don't know whether to check for Federal Pacific breaker panels, but my insurance company does. Title insurance companies maintain databases. Specialty insurers develop expertise in rare risks.
Insurance can surface cases where people don't agree on how high the risk is, and force them to explicitly account for it on balance sheets.
Insurance can be a scapegoat, allowing people to set limits on otherwise very high expenses. Society (though less LW, which I think is eroding a net-positive arrangement) generally agrees that if a parent buys health insurance for their child then if the insurance company says no to some treatment we should perhaps blame the insurance company for being uncaring but not blame the parent for not paying out of pocket. This lets the insurance company put downward pressure on costs without individuals needing to make this kind of painful decision.
Relatedly, agreeing in advance how to handle a wide range of scenarios is difficult, and you can offload this to insurance. Maybe two people would find it challenging to agree in the moment under which circumstances it's worth spending money on a shared pet's health, but can agree to split the payment for pet health insurance. You can use insurance requirements instead of questioning someone else's judgement, or as a way to turn down a risky proposition.
There are still cases where the model is useful: none of these benefits would apply to insuring my mandolin, computer, or a flight, and none of these are a large enough portion of my wealth for the calculator to say I should get the insurance. But if you apply the model without thinking about how well it applies in a particular case it will often tell you not to buy insurance in cases where insurance would actually help.
2024-12-21 21:00:00
There's a nice sledding hill a short drive from our house. It has an area with a gentler slope, where we would go when the kids were younger, but at this point the main attraction is a slope that drops ~60ft over ~400ft:
The big downside is that it's steep all the way down to a fence at the bottom. The town usually puts hay bales at the bottom, and while growing up I was told they were put there after too many kids died from hitting the fence, I can't find the news stories that I would expect to accompany any such deaths so I think that's an urban legend. The key to having a good time on this hill is to sled the right route:
10-foot contours
You pick up a lot of speed on the initial downhill, turn left to go parallel to the fence while continuing down the hill, and then shed your speed by turning uphill at the very end. I like to use my hands to steer and brake, with sturdy mittens—I don't know how people can tolerate using heels, with the amount of snow spray that kicks up.
Afterwards you walk back up the other side, following the essential etiquette of staying out of the sledding zone:
At this point Lily (10y) can do it herself; Anna (8y) still prefers to go with me. Before letting Lily go down alone (here, or any other slope where there's anything you could hit) I did have her show me she could reliably bail. And we don't let them use tubes, where it's hard to steer and you can end up going backwards.
(This park also has a great slide, source of the name "Big Slide Park", which has reopened after almost two years, a year behind what was originally planned.)
2024-12-20 21:00:00
I originally wrote this a year ago, but just now found it in my drafts. Not sure why I didn't post it then.
One flavor of response I got with my post on deanonymizing accounts was roughly:
Why not just go ahead and post the list of alts? It's not like people sneakily using multiple accounts is something we should be encouraging!
I do agree there are ways people abuse alts / burners / throwaways. You shouldn't be making new accounts to get around bans, or to give the illusion that an idea has more independent support than it really has ("sockpuppeting"). But there are also some good reasons to use them:
Separating aspects of your life. Perhaps you post your political views under one account and your work views under another. This could be because an aspect of your life is stigmatized, you have a career where you need to interact with people with a wide range of political views, or you just would prefer to keep clear boundaries.
Lowering how much weight people put on your views. Some people consistently post insightful and well-considered comments or have a position in their community where they are highly respected. Having a separate account to post idle thoughts and participate like a regular human lets them post things others won't take overly seriously.
Protecting yourself from retaliation. Perhaps you are one of many who know about some harm, but due to threats none of you would be willing to post under your real names. Some kind of anonymous whistleblowing could be very positive.
What's acceptable can also vary by community. For example, on Reddit making a new account just so the username can contribute to a joke you're setting up is part of the culture, but on a more serious forum that would be seen as an abuse of the account system.
Overall, I find the benefits of keeping everything under one identity are really high, and I suspect many people underestimate the value they'd get from that approach. But if others decide in their situation the tradeoffs point the other way, and aren't abusing alts to mislead people, then go for it.
This is part of why I posted on deanonymization: if it's important to you that readers not link your alt back to your main identity then you need to take active steps beyond just using a different username.
2024-12-19 21:00:00
Whenever I make baked mac and cheese the crispy top layer is the most popular part. The Maillard-browned cheese is really very good. Sometimes I'll make extra topping by grating another round of cheddar onto the top and sticking it back under the broiler, which works pretty well.
A few weeks ago I got excited about the possibility of making something with more layers: could I put down sauced pasta, then cheese, brown it, and repeat? Something a bit like lasagna?
In the spirit of reporting negative results, this turns out not to work well. The flavor is there, but the texture I was imagining, with alternating layers of chewy pasta and crispy browned cheese, is not. In retrospect this makes sense: if you put something crispy like that between two layers of sauced pasta, it's going to take in a lot of moisture from the sauce.
Still worth eating, but mildly less tasty than the normal way while also being much slower.
2024-12-17 21:00:00
Don't just buy some gear, throw it in a closet, pat yourself on the back, and move on. You are not prepared unless you practice with your supplies and plans. —The Prepared
Preppers are often pretty negative on people who, after realizing disasters are worth taking seriously want to go out and buy a bunch of stuff. And it makes sense: there is a lot of marketing aimed at preppers, pushing all sorts of things that are marginally useful, and it's healthy to have some pushback. On the other hand, it seems to me when thinking through disaster scenarios it's just really useful to have stuff. And if you're only up for putting a short amount of time into this I think it generally makes sense to allocating that time to figuring out what you need, buying that, and then moving on.
Our world is complex and supply chains are long. A disaster doesn't even have to be very big (ex: one broken ship, and a bad law) before people with the most precarious supply start seeing empty shelves. Having bought what you need in advance instead of waiting until you see a disaster coming means you're not competing with everyone else for the stuff that's already in stores, which is (a) selfishly good because you're not risking missing out and (b) altruistically good because you're reducing demand during a shortage.
This is not to say that practice and knowledge are not important, but I think they should be lower priorities for most people than getting the basics together.