Many people know of the tragedy of the commons where individuals don’t each have a rational interest in keeping up a public space, and so all suffer. The problem is insufficient ownership and can be solved by giving each person responsibility for maintaining a specific part. But have you heard of the opposite problem – the tragedy of the anticommons? These are problems of too much ownership rather than too little.

Rational home buying. Lots of things go wrong, rationally speaking, when buying a house, so focus up. Location matters lots, so does thinking clearly about money and savings, thinking realistically and practically about what you’d actually use the house for, happiness from relative not absolute wealth, and not overthinking things.

Myers-Briggs is a bad indicator of personality. Use The Big Five instead.

Here’s a report of the interaction between Peter Singer and Harriet Johnson, a prominent member of the disability rights movement. This is great reading for a more nuanced understanding about how utilitarianism is viewed.

“22 Maps That Show How Americans Speak English Totally Differently From Each Other”. Totally different is a stretch, but the maps are still interesting.

So, yeah, the people who have policy opinions that disagree with you probably aren’t moral monsters.

“Maximizing Your Donations via a Job”. Basically a how-to guide to getting a higher salary job in computer programming careers.

“The Roots of Morality: Does Religion Play a Role or is the Tail Wagging the Dog?” The title of this YouTube video is technically a false dichotomy, but the video is still interesting. Presents a lot of modern moral psychology in a compelling way.

Philosophical landmines are concepts in philosophy which tend to unnecessarily complicate and derail an otherwise useful conversation.

Last summer, I finished reading David Bornstein’s book “How to Change the World: Social Entreprenuers and the Power of New Ideas”. The book is pretty neat, detailing the work of several “social entrepreneurs”, or talented people who work to solve social problems in their communities.

The book also details the non-profit organization Ashoka: Innovators for the Public and its founder Bill Drayton, who helped fund and advise these social entrepreneurs. The stories are compelling, fascinating, and inspiring tales of people overcoming obstacles to make large scale changes for the better.

What bothers me about the book, though, is while it’s called “How to Change the World”, it’s not actually a how-to book at all… at least not in any way that is immediately actionable or doesn’t involve doing a lot of reading between the lines. The key premise is that there are great people out there who have great ideas and can do great things if only we trust them and fund them.

But if you aren’t one of these great people – or worse yet, you have no idea how to find these great people and trust them and fund them – then you’re out of luck. While there’s a bit of confusion and mixed messaging throughout, the book seems to settle on the fact that not everyone can be a social entrepreneur. What are us everypeople supposed to do?

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Follow up to Why I’m Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too)

My previous essay Why I’m Skeptical About Unproven Causes (And You Should Be Too) generated a lot of discussion on LessWrong and the Effective Altruist blog.

Some related questions that came up a lot was: what does it take to prove a cause? What separates “proven” from “speculative” causes? And how do you get a “speculative” cause to move into the “proven” column? I’m going to tackle that here.

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Follow up to “New Years Resolutions: July Edition“

I’m still going strong.

About half a year ago, I outlined some New Years Resolutions, and then did what I thought impossible – used the power of blogging, precommitment, and betting to actually stick to my plans. Following up my last report in July, I present my August update, where I see how I’m doing against my goals, and… more importantly… update my goals based on how things are going so far.

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“Becoming Superman”: “Alexander had big plans for life after university. Upon completing his engineering degree, he was going to fly out to Africa and build dams. In the end, he took a mergers and acquisitions job in the City. Rather than a story of idealism lost, however, this is one of idealism redirected. Alexander now gives around 50 per cent of his salary to charity, one of the growing number of converts to moral philosophy’s latest revolution: effective altruism.”

Window shopping might be a good thing after all, because wanting something expensive might make us happier than actually buying that expensive thing.

I’ve been very surprised in my life to notice how even the most trivial inconveniences – like having to walk up a flight of stairs – can stop me from doing what I would otherwise want to do. Scott Alexander notices the same with mail-in rebates and proxies to get around the Great Firewall of China. Not spending 10 minutes to mail in a $200 rebate is insane – you’re passing up what is pretty much a job that pays $1200 an hour! But the real lesson here is not one of admiring irrationality, but one of being able to make systems better by removing these inconveniences.

There’s a subtle difference between looking like you’re helping and actually helping, and it’s actually pretty difficult to notice. Somewhat related is the curse of identity where you substitute that which actually accomplishes a goal of yours with something that you can convince yourself looks close enough to accomplishing the goal.

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A key question we at Giving What We Can ask ourselves is “how can we make the world a better place?” Currently, we think the best opportunity to do good is to donate to one of GiveWell’s recommended charities.

Peter Buffett, a son of noted billionaire philanthropist Warren Buffett, weighed in on his ideas in his new New York Times op-ed, “The Charitable-Industrial Complex”. Peter Buffett writes about what he calls “philanthropic colonialism”, where people would spend a lot of their money making donations essentially to feel better about themselves, without much regard to whether or not their donations were making a difference or avoiding unintended consequences.

This message is a good one. It’s echoed here by Giving What We Can, and other organizations like “Good Intentions Are Not Enough”, and is a core message of what we call the effective altruism movement.

However, this is not the message that Peter Buffett ends up running with.

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For-profit organizations (better known as businesses) are in many ways much more simple than non-profit organizations. When it comes to a pizza place, their goal is to sell me a delicious cheese pizza for $12.95 and my goal is to find the most delicious cheese pizza I can with my $12.95. When our goals overlap, I give them my money and they give me their pizza.

For businesses, knowing you are successful is also easy – the critical metric of profit is hitting the business in the face every time the cash register opens, and it’s easy to document whether it’s going up or down. We can tell if a business is successful just by looking at these numbers, and we have no need for randomized controlled trials to see if making pizza is really the cause of profit, or if a pizza place could remain profitable without selling anything.

Also for businesses, you are automatically accountable for failure. In bigger companies, you get fired by your shareholders. Or, you simply stop finding yourself having enough money to pay salaries and keep the place open. If your product isn’t serving it’s customers, you quickly go out of business. You don’t have to notice if you’re doing bad, because doing badly will just catch up with you.

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Since living in Oxford, one of the centers of the “effective altruism” movement, I’ve been spending a lot of time discussing the classic “effective altruism” topic – where it would be best to focus our time and money.

Some people here seem to think that the most important thing we should be focusing our time and money on are speculative projects, or projects that promise a very high impact, but involve a lot of uncertainty. One such very common example is “existential risk reduction”, or attempts to make a long-term far future for humans more likely, say by reducing the chance of things that would cause human extinction.

I do agree that the far future is the most important thing to consider, by far (see papers by Nick Bostrom and Nick Beckstead). And I do think we can influence the far future. I just don’t think we can do it in a reliable way. All we have are guesses about what the far future will be like and guesses about how we can affect it. All of these ideas are unproven, speculative projects, and I don’t think they deserve the main focus of our funding.

While I waffled in cause indecision for a while, I’m now going to resume donating to GiveWell’s top charities, except when I have an opportunity to use a donation to learn more about impact. Why? My case is that speculative causes, or any cause with high uncertainty (reducing nonhuman animal suffering, reducing existential risk, etc.) requires that we rely on our commonsense to evaluate them with naīve cost-effectiveness calculations, and this is (1) demonstrably unreliable with a bad track record, (2) plays right into common biases, and (3) doesn’t make sense based on how we ideally make decisions. While it’s unclear what long-term impact a donation to a GiveWell top charity will have, the near-term benefit is quite clear and worth investing in.

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“A Defense of Logical Positivism (Yes, Really)”. I’ve always kind of thought like this. Goes along with this take on a priori reasoning.

“How to Avoid Dying in a Car Crash”. This is important, because it’s one of the highest causes of death for developed-world people aged 15-24, like me. The tips? (1) Don’t be overconfident; (2) don’t be distracted by phones, scenery, fatigue, or other passengers; (3) don’t speed; (4) avoid driving at night, during snow, or during rain; and the obvious stuff like (5) don’t drink alcohol and (6) wear your seatbelt. Also… car helmets?

“Why Smart People Have Bad Ideas” (about start-ups). Generally, the problems are getting too excited and not putting in sufficient amount of time (i.e. weeks) in challenging the general idea behind your start-up, not wanting to do the un-fun parts of the job, and being too timid / risk-averse.

As Dan Gilbert points out in his TED Talk, our beliefs about what will make us happy are often wrong. It turns out we can adapt and find happiness in even some of the worst situations. Hilarity ensues.

Value of information is important. Here are four examples.

“The Importance of Security Engineering”. Also, should we pursue security awareness training?

A good summary of effective altruism.

Giving What We Can, of which I am a member, is a group that is united by taking a pledge to donate 10% of one’s income to seriously affect extreme poverty in the developing world. However, donating is still widely considered an individual affair, despite criticism(1).

So why would people want to join together and make their giving public? Because it turns out there is value in joining together and creating a community around a common cause. In this essay, I will explore the benefits that members of a community get from associating with a group, specifically focusing on Giving What We Can.

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