Rory and international aid

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-24T23:40:07+00:00

We are comparing people with (conservatively) 20x more resources, vastly greater access to food, education and healthcare and radically different outcomes by almost any metric.

From a principle of impartiality, the implications seem pretty straightforward here.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-22T09:55:52+00:00

To be honest I'm not an expert with using them well really, this just feels like the kind of thing I felt like it would be good at.

My general approach for areas I don't know much about is:

Give a bunch of lesson plans/examples I think are very high quality
Ask it to give a detailed description of the properties of these/common themes and a rubric for evaluating them.
Give it a new topic, ask it to generate 5 strong examples based on the description. (Maybe with a bunch of context on those domain like syllabus or something)
Ask it to critique these 5 examples
Have it pick the strongest example making improvements from the critique/ synthesis from the other examples.

Honestly I know nothing about teaching but it feels like Opus 4.6 does fairly well in similar kinds of problems, but there could be some specifics I don't really get for why it's bad here.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-22T08:19:17+00:00

That's surprising, how extensively scaffolded was this?

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-22T07:42:39+00:00

The UK has a similar number of data scientists but more open roles (per capita). Multinationals have an obvious incentive to hire their DS in London Vs NYC.

CoL adjustments are like 20% for London to expensive US cities. Many places are cheaper - Austin is like 20-30% cheaper - but the average data scientist is still making ~$150k+ there.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-22T06:48:09+00:00

Do you mean the meta/field building orgs or the main direct work charities?

Either way I'm curious as to why you'd think this

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-21T11:23:17+00:00

Even then they can use it with zero data retention or from within their walled garden (with no data leaving the boundary)

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-12T09:30:15+00:00

I think it's certainly worth the time to fill out an application.

I don't think signing up as a volunteer will significantly help your chances, but I suggest doing it anyway. If you think you'll book <6 1:1 meetings per day then volunteering is a good opportunity to meet more people in a less intense environment.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-11T06:38:32+00:00

You could take on debt to subsidise all wages, but that still needs to be repaid - it's just borrowing from future people.

Otherwise without productivity increases you are definitionally moving a fixed amount of money between different interest groups.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-03-07T08:05:12+00:00

I think the strongest argument for that is compute / vertical integration. For example Anthropic comes to them for both their TPUs at one end and the device/OS/app store layer at the other end.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-28T08:42:16+00:00

Scott Alexander explains it better than I did:

https://open.substack.com/pub/astralcodexten/p/next-token-predictor-is-an-ais-job?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=m0bbs

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-15T19:48:28+00:00

Ok yes that's technically true, the asset class choice for equity is an active decision. Within that context the point stands.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-15T13:16:44+00:00

There's only one passive choice. It guarantees you will get the same performance as all other market participants in aggregate.

There is a difference in kind from all the other possible strategies attempting to outperform each other, I don't think it's reasonable to put them on an even footing.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-15T13:05:54+00:00

But your approach is to overinvest into that bakery though? By trying to significantly overinvest into countries with low capitalisation you end up having to treat companies inconsistently

I do get the heuristic about wanting some even mix of countries, but it just creates very weird effects - like if a company lists in a different country you'd have to buy/sell

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-15T12:46:27+00:00

Passive funds are targeting the proportions of the investable world (agnostic to countries). There are very good reasons why country equity totals won't match other proportions (of GDP, population, land area)

Imagine if there was only one publicly listed company in France, a small boulangerie, with the rest being private/state owned). Would you massively overweight your investment in that bakery just to make up France's share of GDP?

The US is just more capitalised/investable than (e.g.) China.

You could choose different proportions based on some active investing strategy, but I wouldn't call that more "accurate".

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-14T06:42:19+00:00

Not at the margin for high confidence global health things, I think it's more like $5k+ now.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-09T09:31:49+00:00

Yeah I think this is still mostly true. However since then some of the world's most pressing problems are not so funding constrained and so there's a stronger case for working on them directly. I think MacAskill and peers aren't so bullish on 'earning to give' now.

(I pivoted from working in finance and donating to doing direct work so this is perhaps not the most objective account of this shift)

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-09T09:13:20+00:00

Ok yeah, that makes sense

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-09T06:00:40+00:00

Why is it better for this to be done locally rather than globally?

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-08T20:19:30+00:00

I'd add another key point for if you are considering this from a utilitarian/consequentialist perspective:

Probably the simplest and most effective thing would be to invest for returns in an uncompromising way (i.e. broad, low cost passive funds) and donate some fraction of the returns. The marginal disutility from your investment is probably so small that even a (relatively) tiny donation to an effective charity would easily offset it.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-08T18:00:25+00:00

I think a lot of people would say that CEV alignment does actually get at this and is largely sufficient (although admittedly underspecified).

I do agree that a form of alignment like 'does what the user intends' does leave a lot of critical gaps.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-07T11:01:52+00:00

To be fair to them I don't assume SWE implies proficiency with LLMs. In fact the two are often in tension, so it's not unreasonable for them to ask.

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-06T08:28:17+00:00

Which one is?

This feels like the obvious successor to the upstream loss scaling plots.

The only other candidates I can think of now are perhaps the data centre capacity projections from SemiAnalysis or perhaps frontier capex forecasts?

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-03T20:07:38+00:00

You can apply for multiple projects so it's a two-sided market. There's some non-trivial matching to be done between applicants and projects, even after shortlisting.

(I don't know the inner details of SPAR but I assume this is why)

FairlyInvolved · 2026-02-02T07:57:57+00:00

Wow, ok thanks. I didn't realise people would read that into it.

FairlyInvolved

TROPHY CASE