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...
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...
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:
Ads that are offered o...
LOVE the new intro article!!
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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...
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:
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!).
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...
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.
Seriously! This has gotta be one of the best update/recruiting posts I've ever seen on EA Forums. Wishing you guys the best!
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:
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.
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)