All of HenryStanley's Comments + Replies

In addition, the "not funding a company that will make the world worse" constraint on this program likely makes unicorn status substantially less likely

Citation needed on this - I’m not sure what net-bad unicorns you’re thinking of (and I’d be interested to know), but I think at the outset they probably mostly looked like not-making-the-world-worse ideas and by the time they’re getting to unicorn status the original incubator has very little influence over what they do.

I actually think the overlap between those interested in EA and founding unicorns i

(I ask because I think burnout is a serious problem and its seriousness is probably generally under-appreciated in this community)

It's bizarre isn't it

Very much hoping the board makes public some of the reasons behind the decision.

This is wonderful.

I'd love to see a writeup of what happened in 2018 if you're willing to share.

One thing I hadn't realised is that Ilya Sutskever signed this open letter as well (and he's on the board!).

An open letter from 500 of ~700 OpenAI employees to the board, calling on them to resign (also on The Verge).

Suggests there's an enormous amount of bad feeling about the decision internally. It also seems like a bad sign that the board was unwilling to provide any 'written evidence' of wrongdoing, though maybe something will appear in the coming days.

But all told it looks pretty bad for EA. Seems like there's an enormous backlash online - initially against OpenAI for firing everyone’s favourite AI CEO, and now against “EA” “woke” “decelerationist” types.^[1... (read more)

I don't understand the strategy of creating a lower risk business in order to fund a higher risk business though: if you are aligned with your investors (and if your goal is "make money" then you probably are aligned), then it seems strictly better to use their money instead of your own?

Second-time founders (at least in my experience, and in the UK/Europe) have a much easier time getting funding for their businesses. Certainly as a first-time founder our experience of getting funding has been like pulling teeth, despite decent traction and ARR. With gre... (read more)

Generally speaking, should tech people start startups and EtG?

For those that have done so: would you advise going for broke and trying to make those startups as big as possible? Or optimise for something more sustainable that can be exited to generate cash, and then start something else higher-risk?

Since you offered: 0.015% tretinoin + niacinamide 4% + urea 5% moisturiser at night, SPF50 in the morning. What else should I be doing?

“There's no life bad enough for us to try to actively extinguish it when the subject itself can't express a will for that”

Agreed that this seems nonsensical on its face.

Downvoting because you’ve already posted this exact comment several times in this thread. Just post it once and link to it.

Also - the whole point of getting a licence is to test that you can drive to a specific standard. Not just “my friends taught me how to drive so it’s fine”. The fact that the penalties for driving without a licence are small doesn’t make it good behaviour.

Thanks!

I set up a DAF with Founders Pledge (which is available to all Pledgers subject to a minimum £10,000 initial deposit) - it's a screenshot from their internal granting tool.

What do you think about having more of an EA presence at Vegan Camp Out more generally? I was there and was surprised not to see any of the big names I'm familiar with in the animal welfare movement.

I guess I don't even really understand her relevance. Fully a third of the TIME article is about her mediation in an EA house, and makes her bad behaviour out to be emblematic of problems at the core of EA, but she's... just some random person, right?

From some online digging: she's listed as an attendee at EA Global 2016. She appeared on the Clearer Thinking podcast in 2021. She's never posted on the EA Forum or LessWrong, at least not under her own name that I can find. Her relationship with EA seems at the most to be very, very slight. Am I missing somet... (read more)

This is awesome, thank you so much for writing it. Incidentally I wrote a piece on treating restless legs syndrome (RLS), step 1 of which is “fix iron deficiency”: https://henryaj.substack.com/p/how-to-treat-restless-legs-syndrome

"What about eugenics? Do I support eugenics? No, not as the term is commonly understood." - This is just not a useful thing to mention in an apology about racism, or at least, not in this way

I actually think this was quite reasonable. He's a bioethicist, after all – 'eugenics' has a bunch of different meanings in that field and it's important to distinguish between them

The figure of 85% of Americans having their wisdom teeth removed isn’t very informative as (IIRC) most Americans have them removed by default, even if there’s no impaction.

In the UK, the NHS only removes them if they’re causing problems (although in practice I found they were quite reluctant even in this case). That would provide a more useful base rate.

Good point about stimulants mostly being useful as adjuncts and not as monotherapy.

You generally consider yourself to be happy, highly composed and emotionally stable. You have no history of depression or other mood-related dissorders

Some stimulants seem to work well for depression, however: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6375494/

I’m not convinced you can really replace sleep with caffeine in any meaningful way; tolerance to caffeine builds so quickly as to make it unuseful after a couple of weeks.

Would be interested in your experience with tranylcypromine; it sounds to me to be way more dangerous than amphetamines.

Came here to post this same article - I think it does a good job outlining all the ways in which this really was a fraud and not some sort of accounting mistake as seems to be presented by some media outlets.

This seems like generally a bad precedent to set - lots of people put a bunch of time into writing thoughtful comments; those comments are now gone. Even leaving the post up with the body blanked out would be preferable. I’m not sure the author of a post should have the power to erase all the discussion of it unless they have a very good reason.

Fine on chrome for me

This all seems very sensible and reasonable. But at the time of writing this comment, your post still makes all of the ‘bailey’ claims I mentioned, which rather proves the point that you’re using a central reasonable claim to justify a bunch of related but unreasonable/poorly-evidenced ones. I suspect this muddled thinking is why you’re getting downvoted.

(I'm sorry your experience has been so bad.)

It feels like there's a motte and bailey here.

Motte: powerful men who wield control over EA money shouldn't use that power for sexual gain. Baileys, as I see them: EAs shouldn't get into relationships with one another, we should implement strict rules to enforce this, women who are "redpilled" have basically been brainwashed by polyamorous EAs, EAs sleeping together somehow contributed to the FTX debacle(?).

Your point about Title IX seems especially strange - as I understand it Title IX has led to universities de... (read more)

This seems to be “not even wrong” - FTX’s business model isn’t and never was in question. The issue is Sam committing fraud and misappropriating customer funds, and there being a total lack of internal controls at FTX that made this possible.

Surely it’s at least implied that people shouldn’t earn to give through fraud/criminal behaviour?

(The image at the bottom of the post is broken, btw)

This is wonderful – thank you so much for writing it.

Mutual dedication to one another’s ends seems like a thing commonly present in religious and ethnic communities. But it seems quite uncommon to the demographic of secular idealists, like me. Such idealists tend to form and join single-focus communities like effective altruism, which serve only a subset of our eudaemonic needs.

Agree about secular, single-purpose communities – but I'm not sure EA is quite the same.

I've found my relationships with other EAs tend to blossom to be about more than just EA; tho... (read more)

(I ask not just for selfish reasons as a fellow depressive, but also because making EAs happier probably has instrumental benefits)

Huge congratulations on the book!

My question isn't really related – it was triggered by the New Yorker/Time pieces and hearing your interview with Rob on the 80,000 Hours podcast (which I thought was really charming; the chemistry between you two comes across clearly). Disregard if it's not relevant or too personal or if you've already answered elsewhere online.

How did you get so dang happy?

Like, in the podcast you mention being one of the happiest people you know. But you also talk about your struggles with depression and mental ill-health, so you've had ... (read more)

We should at least strive to get it above The Very Hungry Caterpillar (#21).

FGM is distinguished (beyond the forms in which it occurs) in that there are no medical reasons for doing it, nor does it have any health benefits for women

A small aside on this, which I found interesting:

if anti-FGM campaigners and organizations such as the WHO continue to play the “no health benefits” card as a way of deflecting comparisons to male circumcision, it will not be long before medically-trained supporters of the practice in other countries begin to do the necessary research. ...

I suggest, therefore, that by repeating the mantra—in nearly ever

On a meta level, I'm surprised by how unpopular Sjlver and DukeGartzea's comments are in this discussion relative to others'.

For me it was seeing arguments made from emotion ("It is very clear that violence against men is less of an issue than violence against women", no evidence provided) when responding to comments that contained data on men being the majority of victims of violence. When challenged they performed a bait-and-switch by offering stats for sexual assault (which is indeed more common in women, and a deeply serious issue, but is a subset of a... (read more)

[am stepping back from this thread now as it's getting a bit distant from the original post and I don't wish to derail it]

Quite horrifying, I agree. But scale is notable here: 6 times as many men are circumcised, so if the quality of life lost was 0.5% then the total lost utility is the same between the two groups.

And given that some number of circumcisions go wrong, leading to loss of sensation, pain during sex, rarely partial or total amputation and other forms of suffering ("the constant discomfort of a genital injury creates a covenant of pain," writes... (read more)

I'm touching the third rail here, but I think there probably is a nuanced comparison to be made that considers the different forms of FGM (including the prevalence of the most minor forms – involving making small nicks or pricks in the skin – which are less invasive than male circumcision) along with its prevalence globally (30% of men are circumcised while 5% of women have been subjected to FGM).

There's also the legal/societal/neglectedness comparison: FGM is widely condemned and illegal in most countries, with prohibitions extending across jurisdictions ... (read more)

... which arguably gives circumcised males the benefit of longer sex ;-)

I guess if FGM had some possible sexual benefits, that would make it acceptable?

On the topic of starting a publishing house/imprint - I recall seeing a suggestion from Ben Pace that an EA could buy Blackwell's in Oxford and steer it in an EA direction...

My brief review: I've had a handful of sessions with Yonatan and they've been great. He's friendly and kind, and has a great way of getting you to think differently about problems you're facing at work and in your career.

I'm the CTO of an early-stage startup, and have found that (contrary to my expectations) it's the emotional/grit side of things that's the most tricky to navigate, rather than anything technical. So our conversations have focused on co-founder relationships, hiring and onboarding new employees, and general thoughts around startup life.

To what extent does the Animal Welfare Fund take into account ACE's recommendations?

I'm beginning to view ACE's evaluation process as somewhat suspect after they delisted GFI seemingly over minor complaints about management, and would want to be confident that the Animal Welfare Fund is sufficiently independent.

Thanks for the thoughtful reply.

(I spotted that YouGov graph yesterday; agree that it's pretty compelling evidence for XR increasing concern about the environment.)

Thanks for putting this together. I haven't had a chance to go through your cost-effectiveness estimate in detail, but I do plan to. However:

I would attribute XR 10-50% of the credit for shifting the previously agreed net-zero date from 2050 to 2030, due to their Overton Window-shifting demand of net-zero by 2025 and huge popularity in the UK

YouGov compiles a list of famous UK charities and their popularity; XR is the second-most disliked charity on the list (38% of people surveyed saying they dislike). The only more-disliked charity is the far-right Engli... (read more)

Of note: "ACE is not able to share any additional information about any of the anonymous allegations", and yet ACE turned down GFI's offer to investigate the complaints further:

GFI would be happy to participate fully in an investigation of the complaints to better understand and address them, and we offered to hire an external investigator. ACE declined

Which makes is sound as though GFI were willing to make efforts to resolve/investigate these anonymous complaints but ACE were not willing to pursue this.

As Pablo noted, concerns over the uncertain impact of... (read more)

Fantastic work!

I could believe that mHealth/iCBT/online therapy is very cost-effective, but the claims here seem to be about Mind Ease in particular. As such the meat of the report is likely to be found in chapter 4, the actual evaluation of Mind Ease – but this section is inaccessible.

Is there a reason this was omitted from the public report?

Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like the wiki isn't labelled as such - as in, there isn't a part of the site called the 'wiki'. There's also the 'tags portal' which refers to the 'EA Forum Wiki', but as I understand it that page essentially is the wiki. The language is confusing.

Should there be a section of the site called the 'wiki' that lists all these pages? Or maybe even consider renaming tags to wiki - where posts on the forum can be 'tagged' with a wiki article.

(The URLs for tags should probably more conventionally be in the format /tags/&l... (read more)

Seconding the Replacing Guilt series (and podcast); it’s fantastic.