All of gogreatergood's Comments + Replies

Great link, helpful indeed, thank you. 

(Way better than Scientific American's unnuanced dismissal of RCTs / "hierarchy of evidence" in general.)

If anyone happens to ever read this post in the distant future... I'd like to say, my "side point" at the end of this, was poorly thought out / poorly written / unkind.

Also, this post as a whole could have been framed a little better. I see some 'background' ideas that I could have included for better context, for one.

But in general I think it's better to leave up eh writings than delete it, so I'm not going to edit or delete this.

Appreciate that you got me thinking slightly more hopeful about AI, in your anecdotes that built into your last paragraph. Thank you!

As a side note, I also appreciate your quick point... about men possibly being disproportionately affected by some incoming negatives. -- I am worried about our current misunderstandings of male distress; and how these already existing problems could be exacerbated by AI, as you mention. Thanks for bringing this up.

  • If you are not liking that one study, because it doesn't do a risk-benefit for both sides... then just refer to the other studies I link more prominently to, which do.
     
  • If you think it is "terrible reasoning" to not do a risk-benefit of both sides, before making explicit or implicit statements... we are certainly on the same page... This is my issue with EAG's recommendation. 
     
  • Handstands are not in the same ballpark as hospitalization for permanent heart damage. Perhaps I take this more seriously because I know people this happened to. Just l
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That's cool. Thanks for letting me know Eli.

I think it's better in the less specific wording you changed it to. 

On the other hand, I think the updated statement would be best interpreted as, a recommendation to get double-vaccinated AND boosted. Which I don't think there is evidence for, personally.

But what do I know, I'm not a particularly well-educated EA. And I could certainly be wrong.

In other words: I do think the wording now is better; but you probably shouldn't care too much what I think anyways :P

(Fwiw, I did also just mention in separate comm... (read more)

I first thought it's a slight improvement, as it's a little less specific.

On the other hand, I believe being "up to date with WHO-approved vaccines" probably is best interpreted as being double-vaccinated AND boosted. Which I disagree with more than the original phrasing.

I don't see even slight evidence that this is a good recommendation, certainly not for healthy young men... but even for other demographics as well. (keeping in mind natural immunity backdrop, and recent vs old strains backdrop... and then comparing slight risks both ways)

(Also, I agree wi... (read more)

  • I agree with you, that it may be, that the benefits of vaccination outweigh risks, for population as a whole. 

    Please also narrow in to my actual point, which is that for large demographics, it's not a good idea to now get double-vaccinated. Whereas, EAG recommends all attendees to get double vaccinated. (Or at least they did; they seem to have changed their wording just now as a result of this post.)

    You want to talk about other demographics, or even the population as a whole?  Let's do it, as an additional topic. As I don't see good risk-benefit
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Bro they just changed that statement now, seemingly from me posting this? Idk.

Look:

https://web.archive.org/web/20221222171814/https://www.effectivealtruism.org/ea-global/events/ea-global-london-2023

"we recommend attendees to be double-vaccinated with WHO-approved vaccines."

3
Eli_Nathan
1y
Hi — I can confirm we did update the website now as a result of you posting this, so thanks for flagging this!
3
Jason
1y
Does the change affect your criticism of the statement?
  •  I linked to a variety of studies, which show that basic risk-benefit calculation says: for large demographics, do NOT get double vaccinated in current times. 

    Please be specific about what I am posting that is "wildly unscientific."

     
  • Yes one of my linked studies was specific to teenage boys. My other links include men 30 and under etc. In either case, we're talking about large demographics of millions of people that shouldn't be dismissed out of hand, and which certainly cover EAG attendees. I'm not sure why you would zoom to just one of my s
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2[anonymous]1y
I was specifically referring to the free press article that you linked to at the end . I understand that the authors are not explicitly saying that covid vaccines caused sudden deaths, and for the record I take seriously both the failure of the public health establishment to be transparent (about many different covid-related issues) and also the risk of myocarditis associated with vaccines. The article has terrible reasoning throughout, but just as an example, it reads There is never any mention (in the linked article--did not read the original study) of how many people were in the population of vaccinated individuals that the study looked at nor the incidence of myocarditis in the unvaccinated or even pre-covid population. These kind of cherry-picked and context-free statistics are present throughout the article and it has a completely disingenuous tone of "we're just asking questions" when in fact it seems clear to me that the goal is to intentionally mislead the reader about the risks of vaccination.  With that said, I fully believe that it should be up to individuals to weigh these risk for themselves. Which is consistent with EAG "recommending" vaccination--I personally don't really care if they "recommend" daily handstand practice--there are bigger credibility fish to free.

As expected, this is getting more downvotes overall, at least for now.

I hope to get some feedback as to what specific nuances anyone thinks I am missing.

4
Jeroen De Ryck
1y
At the risk of wasting my time on this. The quote is incomplete, you omitted an important part. This is the full quote: "Associations were stronger in younger men <40 years for all vaccines and after a second dose of mRNA-1273 vaccine, where the risk of myocarditis was higher after vaccination than SARS-CoV-2 infection." You also ignore the overall conclusion of the paper which says "Overall, the risk of myocarditis is greater after SARS-CoV-2 infection than after COVID-19 vaccination".  The second study you link there is also only about male adolescents. This study has a general conclusion as well: "Our findings strongly support individualized paediatric COVID-19 vaccination strategies which weigh protection against severe disease vs. risks of vaccine-associated myo/pericarditis." I don't know about the other study, but this one uses VAERS data, which has been abused due to its unverifiability. Indeed, as did Belgium. Important to note here is that these restrictions were only for a specific subset of the population, and only for non-mRNA vaccines. mRNA vaccines are fine. This is not a reason to not get vaccinated at all.  It doesn't have to in order to be effective. It slows down transmission and reduces the number of hospitalized people and deaths. It also reduces severity of symptoms for those who are vaccinated and go get the virus. Have you read even the abstract of this paper? You are purposely framing it in such a way that supports your argument. The paper talks specifically about mandates, not recommendations, as EAG does. The study also mentions in its limitations that many adverse effects may be due to the nocebo effect or anxiety. The data from this study comes in part from the Wellcome Trust, which is known for having financial stakes in pharmaceutical companies which remains unreported in its conflict of interest and that it gains financially from the pandemic.   The WHO has recommended the vaccine anyway. The reason for your downvotes is that yo
3[anonymous]1y
Very strange to me that you call a disease that killed roughly 267k people in the U.S. in 2022 "not particularly dangerous." 2022 deaths were almost all omicron variants. Few if any attendees at EAG are children, so it is hard to see the relevance of vaccine risk-benefit calculation for  young boys. You raise some valid points but I think you post got so downvoted because it is hard to take your overall concern seriously when you link to wildly unscientific and frankly loony-sounding articles like the free press one (It could have been written about literally anything: "have you noticed that ever since the Seattle Seahawks won the super bowl, the rate of gun violence in the U.S. has skyrocketed?? I'm just asking questions!") I say this as someone who is generally opposed to vaccine mandates and thinks these sorts of decision are best left to individuals outside of very extreme situations.

“Existential Risks scholars might find it attractive to put an office inside the Chicxulub crater ;)”

^That is a great idea.

Yucatan is beautiful, and additionally seems a ripe place for EA to gain beautiful perspective from. Didn’t know all this. Thanks to all of you, for writing up this nice piece.

Miranda,  (stumbled on these 3 posts of yours, when searching up a different post. )

Big props for putting an important idea to practice in real life. You rock !!!

4
Miranda_Zhang
1y
Haha aw, thanks! I would love to keep doing these some day.

LOVE this post. The Julia Wise one you link to is my fav. And now this is an excellent pairing for that. I will be sure to share when I see people doing what you describe, or worrying about it, which will be sooner than later !!! 

Thank ya Thomas!!

  1. I  am using the same language here, that I present this project to the media and to others with. I thought this would be beneficial. You are seeing the same thing that the general public sees. Except (I hope) with a lot of background info and links to explain my thinking.
     
  2. My language in that is not weaselly because it links to a page that shows exactly what I'm stating. It's indeed, widely regarded, as one of the most effective charities in the world. By (as the linked page shows) The Life You Can Save; CharityWatch; Great Nonprofits; GuideStar;
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Wow. Read through your 2 comments here (and on the other forum post you linked to - where I also just commented). Thank you so much for taking the time to share the insights. 

I especially like the idea of a site dedicated to this. There are a couple pages out there that I can find, namely on the IWD website itself, but nothing worth even linking to, in my humble opinion. Def room for something awesome to come along, and give a couple options for. (Maybe there could even be a section for effective giving within the US or developed countries too, althou... (read more)

Hey! Jackson alerted me to this post, cause I just posted something similar: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/LRcy4cSmgmXxhy8ym/power-of-int-l-women-s-day-march-8

(Aside from the post itself, Jackson made some helpful comments there as well, which I would recommend looking at!)

This is my 4th year in a row donating to Fistula Foundation on IWD, and trying to get others to donate as well. I usually do something a little extra to get some attention (one time I slept outside for a week in the winter; now a days I do a personal donation match up). I hav... (read more)

3. I'm also wondering... are there similar thoughts / attempts in regards to leveraging mass attention toward more effective aims? 

(I saw some attempts at getting BLM / police reform attention toward more-effective causes; but I don't know how much attention these got outside of EA circles? Any other examples?)

The author of this forum post already links to that :)

Nice post; awesome illustrations.

I really love the https://heyfocus.com/ site blocker (bonus: it tracks how much time I spend working through the day, and I can easily see my work progress in chart form by day, week, month, year).

Got that tip from this article: https://markmanson.net/attention-diet, which also lists other good site blockers, and tips for focus. (skip down to "Step 1" onward, and especially "Step 4".)

Tool by Jon Haidt for reducing polarization: openmindplatform.org

It's a free, interactive course, which takes only ~1.5 hours total.

You can use it individually, or you can start your own group and be able to track your students' progress.

I just finished it yesterday, highly recommend.

Fun Fact: Someone from OpenMind did a lightning talk about it at EAGxBoston 2019.

Interesting article, thank you.

Dr. Donald Hopkins -- he transformed the discrimination he experienced as a youth into curing 3.5 million people from Guinea worm disease.

This is the most captivating EA themed story I am aware of. However, I don't think many EA people even know of him.

I agree with you that stories like this could inspire and commit more people to EA projects.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8nOuAUfXjzQ (5 min NY Times vid on Dr. Hopkins) WARNING -- don't watch this video while you eat noodles!

This is a great post Julia. This helped me. I do a lot of volunteer work in my community and have been thinking about if I should give that up to attempt to devote more time to EA causes (even though I don't want to), but I really should not do this. Don't think I would be that effective with my extra time anyway, because something would be missing from my life. Much love.

Aidan thank you so so much. It means a lot to hear back in detail like this from any EA people. I'm mostly out of any kind of direct contact with EA's (aside from reading articles/videos) so it's awesome to have any kind of conversation. Thank you for helping to expand my knowledge. I understand better how this is all estimated now, and the more I learn about GiveWell the more respect I have for them. Wow. It's intense to come up with conversions like what they are doing.

I did struggle a bit with the $586 number and how I phrased it:

1.... (read more)

3
Denkenberger
5y
If you would like to talk with more EAs, there is (was?) a program where you would get the contact info of a new EA every month and then you could set up phone/VOIP call with them. I didn't find the program easily online when I just searched, but I'm pretty sure someone else on the forum would have the info.

Yo Aaron thank you so so much for taking the time to reply to me with all this info!!! Super helpful!!!

I didn't know about Live Below the Line, that is great to know about. I'm going to look into what people have done with that before I attempt any other projects. Totally get the negative feedback around that idea, which is obviously related to my own take.

As for my quote "if you think this lifestyle is a little odd, you are out of touch with how most people in the world live" - I have to counter that I did have a tent and sleeping bag... (read more)