User Comment Replies

Should You Visit an EA Hub?

alice9y0

Oh, is your house also named Event Horizon?

RyanCarey

No, that would be too much of a coincidence. He must've been visiting the house Event Horizon.

The Counterfactual Validity of Donation Matching

alice9y0

Suppose that, over the time period the match was active, GiveDirectly raised $4.5.

aaaaa

(not $4.5M?)

Jeff Kaufman

Fixed!

Hope: How Far Humanity Has Come

alice9y1

This is not a particularly accurate portrayal.

e.g. "Your life expectancy is around 35." is a myth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_common_misconceptions

or "Imagine what your life would have been like had you been born just 300 years ago - as an average person living in the 1700s." and then you go on to state "And 300 years is nothing - an absolutely miniscule amount of time in the hundreds of thousands of years of human history." but in reality the 1700s were an unusually hellish time and things were better for the averag... (read more)

Owen Cotton-Barratt

I agree that the life expectancy statement may be a bit misleading, but it is factually correct. Life expectancies at older ages have also gone up significantly (if less dramatically). The points Jess is making all seem correct qualitatively even if there are factual errors. Our world in data has some good graphs on this. Their other presentations also do a good job of showing how much life has improved over the past several hundred years.

RyanCarey

Alice, it's an evocative wedding speech not a Science publication! - I don't think this is a helpful or charitable response! I don't think the life expectancy of 35 is even wrong. Yes, infant mortality of 30% is contributing but noone's arguing that infant mortality is a good thing. And even if you don't die an infant, your life expectancy is going to be perhaps 55, which is still a lot less than the 70 or so years that we might expect to live!

Jess_Whittlestone

Ah, thanks for pointing these things out! I didn't realise either of these things - admittedly, I didn't have as much time as I would have liked to research the historical facts for this. A lot of these points were taken from some top posts on Quora on a thread about progress over the past few centuries, and I was (perhaps naively) hoping that crowdsourced info would give me fairly accurate info. Anyway, I was thinking of writing a more detailed article about human progress at some point, so I'll definitely try to do a bit more research and take these points into account - thanks for flagging my errors/sloppiness!

On making spaces friendlier to parents

alice9y2

Like many people (especially among the rationality-esque circles), I have some amount of sensory processing disorder, and certain types of anti-quietandtidy-nesses are extremely disrupting to me, even though I would like to be compatible with as many people as possible.

e.g. Sniffling more than once in a few minutes will cut through whatever I had my attention on, so I have to avoid sniffling people. But I'm perfectly okay with most nose-blowing, coughing, sneezing, and other typical adult sounds.

I haven't had enough experience being around children to get ... (read more)

Julia_Wise

Thanks - that's helpful to add. I guess if I were regularly attending a group where some noise Lily or I made was making it impossible for someone else to focus (whether that was me sniffling or her babbling), I'd like us to talk about it and maybe work out a plan ("I'm not especially interested in this talk, but I really want to hear the next one, so I'll take a walk now and plan to come back in an hour.") I agree with Dette that children will make noises, and no amount of parental competence will stop babies from babbling, etc. The understanding of when to be quiet and when it's okay to be noisy comes much later in childhood, and experimenting with noises is how we all learned to talk.

Bernadette_Young

Thanks for sharing that viewpoint Alice. I would guess the resolving these types of issues largely depend on everybody being clear about their needs and as understanding as possible of other's needs. One thing though, is that there are lots of factors other than the parents' competence that might affect how un-quietandtidy a small person might be on a given day. My daughter is a bit younger than Julia's, but I've already discovered that she might sit quietly through a given situation on one day, but be unsettled and noisy on another. I generally feel quite self-conscious and will remove us both if I think she's disrupting the event. I don't think you intended it this way, but saying people's compatibility with a child is a measure of their parents' skills makes that kind of feeling much more acute!

Risky Giving

alice9y0

aaaaa it's an unbroken wall of text

My first response to this.

Maybe that is useful feedback! It's certainly not about the topic though.

Bernadette_Young

Do you mean this literally? It seems to have normal paragraph breaks and spacing on my viewer.

Effective Altruism Forum
EA Forum

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