david_reinstein
Bio
Participation2
I'm the Founder and Co-director of The Unjournal; We organize and fund public journal-independent feedback, rating, and evaluation of hosted papers and dynamically-presented research projects. We will focus on work that is highly relevant to global priorities (especially in economics, social science, and impact evaluation). We will encourage better research by making it easier for researchers to get feedback and credible ratings on their work.
Previously I was a Senior Economist at Rethink Priorities, and before that n Economics lecturer/professor for 15 years.
I'm working to impact EA fundraising and marketing; see https://bit.ly/eamtt
And projects bridging EA, academia, and open science.. see bit.ly/eaprojects
My previous and ongoing research focuses on determinants and motivators of charitable giving (propensity, amounts, and 'to which cause?'), and drivers of/barriers to effective giving, as well as the impact of pro-social behavior and social preferences on market contexts.
Podcasts: "Found in the Struce" https://anchor.fm/david-reinstein
and the EA Forum podcast: https://anchor.fm/ea-forum-podcast (co-founder, regular reader)
Twitter: @givingtools
Posts 87
Comments1039
Topic contributions9
Project Idea: 'Cost to save a life' interactive calculator promotion
What about making and promoting a ‘how much does it cost to save a life’ quiz and calculator.
This could be adjustable/customizable (in my country, around the world, of an infant/child/adult, counting ‘value added life years’ etc.) … and trying to make it go viral (or at least bacterial) as in the ‘how rich am I’ calculator?
The case
- People might really be interested in this… it’s super-compelling (a bit click-baity, maybe, but the payoff is not click bait)!
- May make some news headlines too (it’s an “easy story” for media people, asks a question people can engage with, etc. … ’how much does it cost to save a life? find out after the break!)
- if people do think it’s much cheaper than it is, as some studies suggest, it would probably be good to change this conception… to help us build a reality-based impact-based evidence-based community and society of donors
- similarly, it could get people thinking about ‘how to really measure impact’ --> consider EA-aligned evaluations more seriously
While GiveWell has a page with a lot of tech details, but it’s not compelling or interactive in the way I suggest above, and I doubt they market it heavily.
GWWC probably doesn't have the design/engineering time for this (not to mention refining this for accuracy and communication). But if someone else (UX design, research support, IT) could do the legwork I think they might be very happy to host it.
It could also mesh well with academic-linked research so I may have some ‘Meta academic support ads’ funds that could work with this.
Tags/backlinks (~testing out this new feature)
@GiveWell @Giving What We Can
Projects I'd like to see
EA Projects I'd Like to See
Idea: Curated database of quick-win tangible, attributable projects
I agree, of course. But I like to use the term 'two sided market' (not in the technical economics sense).
The charitable work must (A) benefit the recipients and the world, but also (B) provide tangible and intangible benefits to the donor -- moral self satisfaction, sense of impact, connection with humanity, relief of injustice, prestige, catharsis, "kama muta", etc . (I always found the term 'warm glow' both vague and a bit dismissive, but it's widely used).
I think linking (A) and (B) is the key to sustaining and increasing effective giving (as well as support for foreign aid and global public goods). Finding ways to make the thing that benefits the world most align with the thing that makes donors feel good.
If a charity or intervention does B but not much of A, we have the old low-impact charity (e.g., people point to opera houses, make-a-wish, etc.).
If it does A but not B (perhaps stereotypically, for mainstream audiences, without good comms: shrimp welfare, AI interpretability, or support for nearly-invisible health-system infrastructure in Africa) we get great but underfunded EA charities.
I've argued (somewhere, to myself?) that, in deciding what charities to found or promote, we might sometimes choose interventions based on something like the product of their likely impact and their likely appeal.
Hi Jack, hoping to find some time to dig into your work soon. Just wanted to make sure you're aware of the similar project I was doing
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/global-development/
https://uj-ai-wealth-philanthropy-steelman.netlify.app/
And maybe doing some comparing and contrasting to see how our independent exercises end up offering. (Feel free to DM me and maybe we do some collab work too).
Yeah I largely agree but I don’t think the word “scandal” is appropriate.
I also think the EA ideas are at least familiar to a larger share of the US population — people in big cities who went to college etc. And maybe even utilitarianism would have some traction as a “sensible way of considering what is good or bad.”
Not sure openness to “alternative lifestyles” is core to EA — but I guess irs a fellow traveler for many/most active EAs?
Not "random", but I think it's kind of hard to argue that they are not doing a massive amount of trolling, ad hominem, and bad faith.
E.g., https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115398251623299921 for a very small tip of the bizarre iceberg.
I'm not sure what a reasonable response to this would be. I can see engaging with conservatives and even maybe with people who identify as MAGA.
At the risk of stating the obvious/strawman, I think interacting with the famous tweets and threads coming from Trump and Hegseth seems unlikely to be fruitful.
I think it's only a slight exaggeration to say that Trump basically does not respond to evidence or logic, and they tend to lash out vindictively against criticism. The only approach that seems to reliably get Trump on your side is to give him and his family money or to praise him.
I guess someone could make the case that those latter approaches would be the right way forward, but they have obvious downsides:
- Incompatible with EA and rationalist epistemics and approaches;
- Feeding a tiger that eventually eats you;
- Aligning AI safety very concretely with an extremely unpopular, controversial, and corrupt president would alienate reasonable people on the other side, and lead to a loss of trust and respect. (I think this point is the most important one.)
But perhaps this is also a straw man. I don't know if anyone here is advocating that AI safety advocates should donate to and praise Trump
Thanks Bob. I agree this would be high value. I've been mainly thinking about human/LLM agreement, but it would be useful to know how consistent each model is, how sensiitive it is to the prompts, whether the models differ in systematic ways, etc.
Actionable takeaways from doing this? Is a 'more stable setup' (one that e.g., has fairly consistent rank orderings) better all else equal, and thus something we should work towards? Probably, as the alternative seems like just 'adding noise'.
Knowing the stability also may tells us how much effort to put into designing and building consensus around a 'reasonable prompt'; if the results are insensitive to this, we shouldn't waste too much time.
Working on implementing something now, at least a first step. I hope to report back on some legible measures of prompt stability (or lack thereof).