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All of Eddie Liu's Comments + Replies

EA as a Tree of Questions
Eddie Liu*4
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I like the tree metaphor! I've always thought of it as a ladder of premises. You climb your way up the ladder, starting with the basics. Every step up the ladder, you lose some people. And if you start really high up the ladder, some people might get confused because they don't understand the fundamental premises. 

But I see how the branching metaphor can lead to the different viewpoints. 

1. Life & quality of life matter. 

2. They can be quantified. 

3. More is better, e.g. 2 lives saved is 2x better than 1 life saved. (Effective)

4. Yo... (read more)

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Self-guided mental health apps aren’t cost-effective… yet
Eddie Liu4
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Ratio of Installs to DAU: Hmm, that's an interesting metric...the way I think about retention is like a layered cake, kind of like the baumkuchen I just ate for breakfast, but linear instead of round. Anyways, there's time on the X axis and users on the Y axis. For any given day, there's a sizeable layer of cream at the top which are the Day 0 users. And then right below that, a smaller layer of Day 1 users, etc. etc. Ultimately there are hundreds of layers of users from older daily cohorts. You can track each daily cohort through time and it'll start big ... (read more)

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huw
Hmm—good points. Getting Installs/DAU wrong could meaningfully affect the numbers, I guess longer-term retention per install is probably a better way of accounting for it. It was unclear to me whether to model retention as having a zero or nonzero limiting value, which would change some of the calculations. Improving organic install rate would be promising if you could get it above 50%, I think (your apps sound very effective!). I suspect a lot of that is, as you say, about consistently building a good user experience and continuing to add value. (I see a lot of Daylio users complaining about the lack of updates & the increased ad load.)
Self-guided mental health apps aren’t cost-effective… yet
Eddie Liu24
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Great overview! I'm Eddie, long-time EA and co-creator of the mental health app Clarity https://apps.apple.com/us/app/clarity-cbt-thought-diary/id1010391170 

I pretty much agree with your broad points. Some quick thoughts on each section from an "insider" point of view:

Short-term impacts of treatment: The problem with these studies is that they study "apps" as a category, but apps are 1. extremely different from one another and vary drastically in quality and 2. are constantly improving. The best apps are probably 10-100x better than the worst mental h... (read more)

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huw
Eddie, thank you (I’m a long time fan!) Short-term impacts: Mmm, this has made me realise I wasn’t explicit about the assumptions I made there—I should either make that effect size bound a bit wider or model it as an exponential (or possibly a beta). I think this CEA is best interpreted as ‘if you built an evidence-based product, what would its cost-effectiveness be?’ but even that should probably have a wider bound. And there’s the new update in Linardon et al. (2024) that will be worth incorporating. Adherence: Thank you! That roughly tracks with the decay curves from SimilarWeb, which is good validation. Although you raise a good point—decay probably depends a lot on whether you’re feature-gating after a trial period or not. Do you have a ballpark for the ratio of installs to DAU? CPI: Those are lower CPIs than the estimates I had—good to know! Are those on Facebook, Tik Tok, elsewhere? I was also assuming organic traffic is negligible after the first hundred thousand or so, but do you still see an effect there? Dev costs: Lovely! Having worked in industry, I definitely have the sense that there are good incentive reasons why headcounts might be unnecessarily bloated 🙃 Opportunities: I won’t ask what your roadmap looks like, but it’s very promising that you have this hunch. In my own experience as a user, I can definitely concur. I’ll mull for a bit and update the OP with some adjustments. I might also shoot you a DM with some curiosity questions later. Thank you again! 😍
Simple charitable donation app idea
Eddie Liu6
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I would lean towards making the first version a website instead so you wouldn't have to go through the hassle of following Apple / Google's rules. For example in the App Store Review Guidelines there are extra procedures to follow for such apps - https://developer.apple.com/app-store/review/guidelines/ it explicitly states: 

3.2.1 Acceptable: (vi) Approved nonprofits may fundraise directly within their own apps or third-party apps, provided those fundraising campaigns adhere to all App Review Guidelines and offer Apple Pay support. These apps must disc... (read more)

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kokotajlod
Ouch, I wasn't aware of those rules, they do seem quite restrictive. If it's a website rather than an app, how easy would it be to set it up so that you can access it with a single button press? I guess you can have favorites, default sites, etc.
Eddie Liu17
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Part of the ad overload problem you're pointing out comes from the nature of both elections and book releases. They're both things that happen once and benefit from gaining a lot of momentum in a short period of time (winning the election, getting on best-seller lists).  As a consequence: 

  • Ad frequency (how often the same user sees an ad) becomes really high in a short period of time. 
  • There's not a whole lot of time to do creative / copy testing and optimization, so users are often hit with the same or similar ads. 

Ads that are offered o... (read more)

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Some updates in EA communications
Eddie Liu22
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LOVE the new intro article!! 

Feedback

At least for me, it was hard to tell the hierarchy of the content. I wonder if a table of contents might be helpful? 

I think the issue stems from H3 and H4 tags being hard for me to tell apart, so a little confusing to subconsciously keep track of where I was in the document. Another problem could be the "What values unite effective altruism?" and "What are some examples of effective altruism in practice?" are H3 but "How can you take action?" and "FAQ" are H2 but in my mind they should all have been at the sa... (read more)

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Clifford
Thanks Eddie. We're planning to make some design tweaks and some edits in the coming weeks including a table of contents. I'll post in the forum when this is done. To be clear, I wouldn't recommend sharing widely until then. We have done exactly that in the process of writing this essay! Thanks for the feedback on the image preview - I hadn't spotted that.
What are the key claims of EA?
Eddie Liu2
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I was just thinking about this the other day. In terms of pitching effective altruism, I think it's best to keep things simple instead of overwhelming people with different concepts. I think we can boil down your moral claims to essentially 3 core beliefs of EA: 

  1. Doing good is good. (Defining good)
  2. It is more good to do more good. (Maximization)
  3. Therefore, we ought to do more good. (Moral obligation)

If you buy these three beliefs, great! You can probably consider yourself an effective altruist or at least aligned with effective altruism. Everything else is downstream of these 3 beliefs and up for debate (and EAs excel at debating!).  

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Is working for Meta a good or bad option?
Answer by Eddie Liu7
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I'm not confident in the belief that Meta as a company causes more harm than good. If you look closely at most of the criticism, it's generally overblown. 

For example, the headline of the 2021 Facebook Leak is "Instagram Harms Teenagers!" but the reality is more complicated - https://www.npr.org/2021/10/06/1043138622/facebook-instagram-teens-mental-health . Cambridge Analytica too: https://mobiledevmemo.com/cambridge-analytica-was-a-false-panic-its-time-to-move-on/ . 

I'm more convinced of the overall harms of social media (esp. in regards to teen... (read more)

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RyanCarey
See also: https://80000hours.org/2013/07/show-me-the-harm/
Introducing Effective Self-Help
Eddie Liu4
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Depending on the study design, it can actually be relatively cheap! Just use Amazon Mechanical Turk or Positly to get participants. Of course, some study designs would be  20x harder than others. I imagine that testing different self help interventions would be rather hard but smaller surveys would be really easy. 

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Eddie Liu8
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Seriously! This has gotta be one of the best update/recruiting posts I've ever seen on EA Forums. Wishing you guys the best! 

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nickfitz
Thanks so much Eddie!
Who are your role models?
Answer by Eddie Liu12
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Personally, I found this article to be full of inspiring people for me - https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/27/magazine/global-life-span.html 

Here are my notes I took on the article at the time: 

  • Pattern is that science discovers something important, a long time passes, then a crusader spreads it to the masses.
  • Variolation (an early form of vaccination): Invented in 1000s, 700 years later, popularized by Mary Montagu, an aristocrat in 1716. IMPACT! 
  • In 1858, a JOURNALIST published an expose denouncing MILK as a liquid poison. Pasteur invented past
... (read more)
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Many Undergrads Should Take Light Courseloads
Eddie Liu6
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I agree with this advice in general. I'd add a caveat that it might be a good idea to prioritize taking courses where you can make smart, like-minded friends. For example, a Computer Science class with a lab component where you work in small groups to get assignments done. 

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