Thanks for responding!
I think it's laudable to investigate the basis for claims as you've done. It's fair to say evidence appraisal and communication really is a specialist area in its own right, and outside our ares of expertise it's common to make errors in doing so. And while we all like evidence confirms what we think, other biases may be at play. I think some people in effective altruism also put a high value on identifying and admitting mistakes, so we might also be quick to jump on a contrary assessment even if it has some errors of its own.
I think...
The mention of the specific errors found in DCP2 estimates of de-worming efficacy, seem to be functioning here as guilt by association. I can't see any reason they should be extrapolated to all other calculations in different chapters of a >1000 page document. The figure from DCP2 for trachoma treatment directly references the primary source, so it's highly unlikely to be vulnerable to any spreadsheet errors.
The table Toby cites and you reference here (Table 50.1 from DCP2) says "trichiasis surgery". This means surgical treatment for a late s...
I'm pleased to see the update on GWWC recommendations; it was perturbing to have such different messages being communicated in different channels.
However I'm really disappointed to hear the Giving What We Can trust will disappear - not least because it means I no longer have a means to leave a legacy to effective charities in my will (which I'll now need to change). Previously the GWWC trust meant I had a means of leaving money, hedging against changes in the landscape of what's effective, run by an org whose philosophy I agree with and whose decisions I h...
Hi Bernadette,
We’re sorry that our communication on this has not been clear enough. We were waiting on some technical details so that we could infor Trust users of the exact changes and what they needed to do in advance but now I’ll communicate what we can today while Larissa Hesketh-Rowe is also going to email Giving What We Can members to make sure everyone is included.
In terms of the Trust we are moving all of the functionality the Trust had over to EA Funds which we believe will ultimately be a much better platform both for users and for us in terms of...
Ethics approval would probably depend on not collecting identifying data like name, so it would be important to build that into your design. College name would work, but pseudo-randomising by leafleting some colleges would introduce significant confounding, because colleges frequently differ in their make up and culture.
Thanks Georgie - I see where we were misunderstanding each other! That's great - research like this is quite hard to get right, and I think it's an excellent plan to have people with experience and knowledge about the design and execution as well as analysis involved. (My background is medical research as well as clinical medicine, and a depressing amount of research - including randomised clinical trials - is never able to answer the important question because of fundamental design choices. Unfortunately knowing this fact isn't enough to avoid the pitfalls. It's great that EA is interested in data, but it's vital we generate and analyse good data well.)
Unless you have a specific hypothesis that you are testing, I think the survey is the wrong methodology to answer this question. If you actually want to explore the reasons why (and expect there will not be a single answer) then you need qualitative research.
If you do pursue questions on this topic in a survey format, it is likely you will get misleading answers unless you have the resources to very rigorously test and refine your question methodology. Since you will essentially be asking people if they are not doing something they have said is good to do...
The median EA donation ($330) was pretty low. There could be various reasons for this, but we can only really pin down an explanation when .impact conduct the next EA Survey. I
According to the reports, the first survey of 2014 (ie reported in 2015) found a median donation of $450 in 2013, with 766 people reporting their donations.
The next survey of 2015 (ie reported 2106) found a mediant donation of $330 in 2014, with 1341 people reporting their donations.
Repeating the survey has gathered more data and actually produced a lower estimate. I'm interested how the third survey will help understand this better?
I didn't down vote it, but I suspect others who did were - like me - frustrated by the accusation of not engaging with you on the substantive points that are summarised in Jeff's post. This post followed a discussion with literally hundreds of comments and dozens of people in this community discussing them with you.
I could explain why I think the term astroturfing does apply to your actions, even though they were not exactly the same as Holden's activities, but the pattern of discussion I've experienced and witnessed with you gives me very low credence that the discussion will lead to any change in our relative positions.
I hope the break is good for your health and wish you well.
No "exchange" has been disclosed. Michelle has disclosed her own words and that she said them to you. Are you claiming people can not report their own speech without the permission of their audience?
I have down-voted this comment because I think as a community we should strongly disapprove of this sort of threat
"If this post gets significant downvotes and is invisible, I’ll be happy to post it as a separate EA Forum post. If that’s what you want, please go ahead and downvote."
The criticisms have been raised in an exceptionally transparent manner: Jeff made a public post on Facebook, and Gleb was tagged in to participate. Within that thread the plans to make this document were explained and even linked to: anybody (Gleb included) could r...
Thank you - this represents a very conscientious follow-up to serious concerns and a very complicated discussion. I appreciate the presentation of considered evidence and the opportunity given for a) members of the community pool their concerns and b) InIn to give their response.
The post doesn't claim that having children makes you "good" or "particularly noble", and there's no moral connotation inherent in something being "a pretty basic part of human life".
You're entitled to think what you like, but there's no reason to be nasty about it.
What an incredibly unfriendly thing to say 12 months later to somebody you've never met in person. Given the context above I'm not sure if you are writing it to say I did not competently parent our child at EAG? The EAG I attended happened 8 months after I wrote that comment. In 8 months young children develop and their needs and behaviour change. What a shock.
Our daughter (14 months old at the time of EAG) was present in the lecture theatre for parts of 2 talks. She did not cry during in any of the lectures. She babbled loudly and I removed her when that ...
Agreed, and though this good evidence about people in EA having a positive experience, it has almost no chance of detecting the people who don't, since participation is conditional on 1.) The subjects choosing to invest significant time and money in attending EAG & 2.) The subjects' applications being approved to attend the conference by the organisers.
I'm not meaning to suggest that the application process was actively weeding out negative people, but pointing out there are a number of significant selective processes before people were asked this qu...
Neil I believe that's true for the UK. For two reasons
So this approach would be counter productive if you earn moderately above the higher tax threshold. The exception would be if you earn so far above the higher tax brack...
That seems reasonable. The advice we've had both specifically and generally from legal people is that a will which appears not to take into account your life circumstances is open to challenge. Certainly in the UK, charitable legacies have been successfully challenged for not taking children into account (even when that appears to have been deliberate). https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2015/jul/28/daughter-wins-164000-decade-long-legal-battle-mother-will-charities
I guess my observation is that almost all people would expect to be in that more complex po...
This is a really interesting topic, and I certainly encountered more complications that I expected in making legacies to charity in my will.
Reading the CS site, it directs you away from the will writing process if you are over 40 or have one of: a spouse, children, property (home ownership?), a business
Does that mean that if someone has written a will with this product, but changes to being one of these categories (over 40, married, a parent, a homeowner or a business owner) then their will would not be valid?
Thanks for being so kind Sean. I think you work harder than just about anybody I know: no excuses needed for you!
My own little victory dance:
When I set my threshold for my pledge in 2009, I pledge both an absolute percentage and a threshold of £25000 above which I would donate all money. I had done my research and tried to set a level that would cover both my own needs and that allow for having a family.
This is the first year we have had to pay any real costs for our daughter. For the first year of her life I was on maternity leave, so the cost was an opportunity cost of reduced salary. When I returned to work last May I had two new pretty huge expenses: full time c...
Your comment above indicated you had measured it at one time but did not plan to do so on an ongoing basis: "However, we can't control that, and it would not be helpful to assess that on a systematic basis, beyond that base rate" That approach would not be sensitive to the changing effect size of different methods.
Not really I'm afraid. That reasoning seems analogous to the makers of glipizide saying: we know lowering blood sugar in diabetics decreases deaths (we do indeed have data showing that) and their drug lowers blood sugar, so they don't need to monitor the effect of their drug on deaths. Your model can be faulty, your base statistics can be wrong, you can have unintended consequences. Glipizide does lower blood sugar, but if you take it as a diabetic, you are more likely to die than if you don't.
It would also be like the Against Malaria Foundation neglecting...
We may have different perspectives on academic readers: I'm a relatively junior medical researcher. Three of my papers have over 100 citations. The view I expressed here is the one shared by my Principal Investigator (a professor at Oxford University who leads a multi-million pound international research consortium, and has an extensive history of publishing in Nature and Science). Humanities and medical research are likely to have some differences, but when fewer than 20% of humanities papers are thought to be cited at all, I'm not sure that supports huma...
I agree that maximising the good done with every effort is the essence of EA; I disagree that the wording and structure of your piece communicated that, even with those words included.
There's a tendency for people who do a lot of academic writing to assume that every sub-clause and every word will be carefully read and weighed by their readers. We agonise for months over a manuscript, carefully selecting modifiers to convey the correct levels of certainty in our conclusions or the strength of a hypothesis. In reality even the average academic reader will ...
I don't think it's about mismatched expectations so much as I have a different assessment than you do of how much this piece is likely to promote effective giving.
If your intention was to promote consideration of impact, or recipient focussed donation behaviour, then I think this article misses that mark. Sure, the information might be there 15 paragraphs deep in one of a dozen links, but it's not conveyed to me - even as an interested reader versed in effective altruism ideas.
If indeed your article was intended by you to promote Charity Navigator style r...
Owen I think these are important caveats.
One further risk is that message you are trying to convey has to be stretched or even distorted to be made relevant to the original story. This is a result of the "hijacking" approach, and unfortunately I think it's evident in this piece.
The problem with Wounded Warriors as I understand it, is not that their proposed projects were not likely to be helpful (I haven't seen evidence that would help me answer that), but that people in the organisation mis-spent funds, and did not use them according to the cha...
AGB reiterates a good suggestion he'd previously made on the facebook group: that no modification is needed for people who participate in EA without being a maximal sacrificer, and it's entirely appropriate to call those people effective altruists. If we want a term for people who are hugely involved, or sacrifice a great deal of their own well-being (I'm not convinced self-sacrifice is a good metric here, but that's another conversation), can't we just find a modifier for those people? Dedicated/devoted may be less problematic when you don't have to search for a counterpart that isn't dismissive.
Thanks for pasting that comment here - I was sure there had been a really good discussion on this, with a general consensus that "softcore" needed to disappear. Perhaps I was just really persuaded by your comment and assumed others were likewise.
I agree there's less an issue a designation for "very involved" being a bit negative, but I'm moderately opposed to "hardcore" because although it is used as you describe, I think its strongest association is with porn.
Thanks for this post Julia.
I know lots of people have been seeking alternatives to the 'hardcore vs softcore' terms that seem to have sprung up, and I agree that alternative terms are preferable to those two for many reasons. However I think you've addressed a much more important issue, that any binary categorisation is artificial and likely to be counterproductive.
Seeking donations from high net worth individuals/ financial 'elites' is a crowded market. The giving pledge is just one campaign targeting these people, which is already connected to networks of very wealthy person. Do we have good reasons to think that EA would have a comparative advantage in such a crowded market?
Another significant disadvantage I see to becoming another group that concentrates targeting high net worth individuals is that we would be perpetuating the myth that only very wealthy people can make a difference, which more moderately wealthy...
Also, any new pledger has some non-zero chance of breaking the pledge (see the GWWC fundraising prospectus for their current estimates, though some people have argued these are under-estimates). The chance of different people is probably largely independent. If this is true, then at the margin, two 10% pledgers have a lower chance of both defaulting and would probably lead to more money being moved (ie narrower 95% confidence interval on the amount moved).
If you use the search function in the main facebook group it's quite straightforward to find plenty of discussion.
"If people make bad decisions then that's unfortunate, but all other things being equal more information leads to better decisions and EA is the last movement which needs to have its strings pulled. "
To be clear: I am not advocating censorship. I'm advocating putting information in a context that makes its scope and importance apparent. It would be naive to ignore that some ideas have mimetic pull, particularly if you're being counter-intuitive by advancing an argument that aid is bad.
"I don't have the time to write about everything."
N...
I think the phrasing of the 'problem' is bad, but the title really isn't the only issue.
"Considerations entirely outside the model: impact of development on wild animal suffering, climate change, technological progress, global economic development, etc."
I'm afraid this really doesn't read to me as being clear about how narrowly a focus this argument takes. I have literally seen people say "Now I've heard about the poor meat eater problem I've stopped donating to SCI", so simply saying you don't draw any conclusion is not, I think, suff...
Hi kbog, I appreciate you've done a lot of work here, but I've downvoted because I have a strong ethical and practical objection to this issue being discussed as 'the poor meat eater problem'. These objections have been hashed out every time this topic comes up. It makes me very sad that the meme persists, and I think it's terrible for it to be associated with EA discussion.
I think the so-called 'poor meat eater problem' is based on 2 fallacies, at least one of which appears somewhat prejudiced: 1.: the decision to focus on only one long term consequence o...
Hi kbog, I appreciate you've done a lot of work here, but I've downvoted because I have a strong ethical and practical objection to this issue being discussed as 'the poor meat eater problem'. These objections have been hashed out every time this topic comes up. It makes me very sad that the meme persists, and I think it's terrible for it to be associated with EA discussion.
Ok, I didn't put any thought into the title, if that's a potential issue then I have no problem changing it.
...Fallacy: the decision to focus on only one long term consequence of adva
I don't think 'we can't know it's not a problem' is a helpful guide to deciding if something needs action. Have you seen any evidence of voting being used by cartels or sock puppets? As you say, it's just as possible for up-votes to be done for nefarious reasons (though I have serious doubts as to whether that's the case) - but requiring comments for up-voting would also be onerous and reduce people's interactions on the forum.
I think the suggested policy would make the forum worse by raising the bar to participation. Greg has explained the problems with it quite articulately above, so I won't recapitulate his comment.
But by the same token everybody in this movement has competing priorities and calls on their time. Their feedback might be helpful to you, but why should they be obliged to give it as the price of participating?
You misunderstand me. I don't think the person is down voting because they disagree, but the fact they are down voting without commenting is an indication they disagree that a down vote requires a comment. That's not ironic.
There are indeed great questions there with extensive responses, many of which point to information that was already publicly available.
I think it's awesome for people to ask questions: in the GWWC fundraising post there's been a really productive discussion. But here, as on a previous occasion, you seem to be suggesting there is some deception going on. You've suggested in another post that you see these responses as 'punching up', but by keeping it vague it also looks a lot like mud-slinging (as opposed to an airing of your concerns, which I hope everybody would be keen to have happen).
Hopefully you'll have time to elaborate on your concerns soon.
I'd find it weird if people who chose their careers based on what they thought was of the greatest benefit didn't advocate for that work to other people with similar priorities.
And in response to the suggestion of self-serving behaviour or even corruption raised by this post, it should be made absolutely clear that the trustees of CEA are legally barred from being employed by or financially profiting from its operations.
The GWWC fundraising prospectus sets out in quite extensive detail the observations and assumptions that underlie the figures, as well as providing the spreadsheets to let you explore how your own probability estimates would change them.
What further information do you think should be included?
Your statement here suggests we have nothing to learn from other movements, which seems an unhelpful position to take.
Sorry for being slow to reply James.
The methods of EBM do absolutely favour formal approaches and concrete results. However - and partly because of some of the pitfalls you describe - it's relatively common to find you have no high quality evidence that specifically applies to inform your decision. It is also relatively common to find poor quality evidence (such as a badly constructed trial, or very confounded cohort studies). If those constitute the best-available evidence, a strict reading of the phrase 'to greatest extent possible, decisions and policie...
Yes, but a very specific one. After our experience I would generally recommend getting a solicitor to write your will.
I think anybody wanting to raise a potentially divisive or negative discussion should think carefully about how likely a given discussion is to be self-defeating, or to yield negative results that outweigh the benefits.
The setting matters a lot to this: if you post on Facebook, the discussion gets published in lots of people's feeds in a manner that posters don't control (I find 'likes' on comments I make in the EA FB group from friends I know are not members of that group). Also, the FB policy of only allowing 'upvoting' means that the degree to which peo...
That's still a very important point that doesn't seem to have been made in the analysis here: the demographic questions were not included in the questions put to all respondents. Since there are good reasons to think that people taking the "full" and "donations only" survey will differ systematically (e.g. more likely to have been involved with EA for longer). If the non responses are not random that's an important caveat on all these findings and very much limits any comparisons that can be done over time. I can't seem to see it discussed in the post?