All of HStencil's Comments + Replies

On this topic, Desmond Ang's recent AER paper “The Birth of a Nation: Media and Racial Hate” is also worth a look.

On media influencing decision-making, you might want to give Giulia Buccione and Marcela Mello's working paper "Religious Media, Conversion and its Socio-Economic Consequences: The Rise of Pentecostals in Brazil" a read.

I do work in this academic neighborhood, so maybe I’ll comment a bit. There’s a part of me that feels like caricaturing Linch’s question as akin to asking: What were all the other physicists doing with their time in 1905, when Einstein was sitting around churning out paradigm-shifting papers without a PhD or even access to a decent academic library? But that’s probably unhelpful, so I’ll try to give a bit more color on Kremer’s context.

First, it’s important to understand that until very recently, experimental work in LMIC settings was really prohibitively ... (read more)

And this isn't even to mention Kremer's substantial contributions to growth theory (which are still his second- and third-most-cited papers), much less the major theoretical contribution he made to the modeling of HIV transmission in his free time back in the late 1990s...

It's worth noting that the second of those papers actually has recently been reanalyzed, and Cutler and Miller have now published a response to the reanalysis, as well. I think there is probably more work one could do on this (e.g., updating the difference-in-differences estimators in the original paper to reflect the current methodological state-of-the-art), but I also think it's fair to say that the result has already been subjected to thorough and meaningful scrutiny.

The political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang has some great work addressing this neighborhood of intuitions. Her view is basically that “corruption” is decomposable into a several distinct types of phenomena, and some of these can be growth-promoting (as in China during the period between, approximately, Deng and Hu), whereas others can be fairly extreme impediments to growth.

Does this mean that even if all of the funds that FTX-related entities granted to EVF-related entities were clawed back, donations to EA Funds (or otherwise through GWWC) would be unaffected (i.e., would still end up in their intended recipients’ hands)?

If you’re serious about pursuing a master’s in economics, it might make sense for us to chat — I know a bit about those programs (in the U.S. context). Depending on where you went to undergrad, what courses you took, your GRE scores, and whether you can spin a compelling narrative about why you finished with a 2.95 GPA, you may be able to get into decent master’s programs without any post-bacc coursework. I know folks who’ve done so with similar grades. That doesn’t mean, of course, that heading off in that direction would be a good idea, but it may be more of a live option than you think.

The answer to this question probably depends to a substantial degree on your particular strengths, weaknesses, and beliefs about biorisk (that is: on how you’re hoping to contribute, what sort of research you’re hoping to do, etc.).

My impression is that this is also broadly true of economics at Harvard compared to economics at MIT. The Harvard econ department seems much more open to undergrads taking grad-level classes, and I have the sense that many prerequisites are not enforced. Harvard, in general, seems to do a better job of recognizing that some of its undergraduates are prepared to pursue very advanced coursework very early on in college than those of its peer schools with which I’m most familiar (which, admittedly, are not among the schools you listed). I think there are a lo... (read more)

Rep. Waters’s statement on the arrest strikes me as compelling evidence against explanations in this vicinity.

https://financialservices.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=410026

I’m also inclined to trust the judgment of the attorneys on this thread about matters like this.

I don't have anything approaching a clear sense of how sensitive & specific the gaokao, IIT-JEEs, etc. are at detecting extraordinary intellect, but I will say that, yeah, I have not heard good things about the incentives that those exams create for students seeking admission to university. Even in places like France, where access to higher education is much less competitive (and much less high-stakes) than in China or India, the baccalauréat seems like it distorts students' incentives in pretty unproductive directions. Whether or not that makes it worse than the current system in the U.S., I don't know.

This assumes that the task of differentiating Ivy Smart+ applicants from mere Ivy Smart applicants is an efficiently solvable screening problem. I think it very likely isn’t and that the costs (to both universities and their applicants) of reworking the application process so that it could reliably distinguish the 99.5th percentile (by intellect) of high schoolers applying to college nationally from the 99th percentile of that group would be unacceptably high. (Notably, the SAT/ACT can’t solve this problem — they’re noisy on the order of several percentiles.)

Like, I guess, if pressed, I’d concede that maybe the mean at Yale is a little higher than the mean at Georgetown, but I’d also assume this should be attributed almost entirely to a handful of outliers in the distant right tail of the distribution at Yale and that the rest of the two schools’ distributions overlap nearly in their entirety. [referring here to imaginary distributions of “true g,” not to distributions of standardized test scores]

I’m in general perfectly willing to draw distinctions in between different “tiers” of universities, but I have to say, as an ~Ivy League Person~, the notion that students at Georgetown (or Northwestern, UCLA, Johns Hopkins, Duke, WashU, UMich, UVA, etc.) might generally be of lower caliber than students on Ivy League campuses has literally never crossed my mind, nor is it one I would have guessed that more than a trivial number of other people in highly educated communities would endorse. I may be wrong, but I’ve really never thought I was particularly progressive in this respect. I’ve always understood the view supported by the data/graphs in this post to be the conventional one.

Glad to help!

This group isn’t exactly EA-aligned, but they’re working on questions that are very relevant to a number of the topics you raised, so you might want to give them a look.

https://forhealth.org/

Hey, sorry, I totally forgot about this until I stumbled across this recent discussion on donating to help with the situation in Ukraine earlier this week. I've pasted a bibliography of relevant papers below.

Aker, Jenny C., Paul Collier, and Pedro C. Vicente. “Is Information Power? Using Mobile Phones and Free Newspapers during an Election in Mozambique.” The Review of Economics and Statistics 99, no. 2 (May 2017): 185–200. https://doi.org/10.1162/REST_a_00611.

Armand, Alex, Alexander Coutts, Pedro C. Vicente, and Inês Vilela. “Does Information Break t... (read more)

[To clarify in case this was unclear: I am just a random outsider and have no association with this Amherst student group.]

I’m a bit skeptical that just trying to get more nonprofits to recruit on campus is a winning strategy here. Among other things, the vast majority of nonprofits don’t have dedicated recruiting staff, and the people responsible for hiring don’t have the time to travel to college campuses to recruit for entry-level positions. The same is going to be true of most public sector openings at the entry level, too. (I do think there are except... (read more)

I would say the same.

"Public service" is obviously a huge and diverse category, but my strong impression is that many public interest jobs (including at the entry level) offer substantially better exit opportunities within public service than nearly any  management consulting gig (and I think this is true to an even greater extent if the comparison is with entry-level roles at investment banks or hedge funds). The problem, I think, is that at least in the U.S., there are very few public interest jobs that are 1) entry-level, 2) open to generalists without prior experience... (read more)

Yeah, I’d be happy to, but I may not get around to it until next week, if that’s alright.

New Harvest is also listed as a standout charity in spite of (my impression is) an even narrower focus on cell-cultured product innovation than GFI (which also supports plant-based meat substitutes). I too would love some clarity from ACE on this.

Answering the question of whether a candidate is “good,” might well (at least on certain EA world views) be sufficient to answer the question of whether donating to the candidate would be (sufficiently) cost-effective (given evidence that 1) donations matter for getting elected, and 2) getting elected allows one to influence policy). Consider the case of a candidate running on a longtermist platform. My impression is that when longtermist grantmakers evaluate giving opportunities in existential risk mitigation, their decision process is much closer to “det... (read more)

If the concern is that donations don't have any impact on electoral outcomes, there is a good bit of high-quality social science research indicating that television advertising, at least, does, particularly (as OP notes) in down-ballot races. If the concern is that it nonetheless isn't worth its cost, that's plausible, but I don't think OP said anything to suggest strong grounds to believe campaign donations beat GiveWell's Maximum Impact Fund, nor (I assume) would most readers leap to that conclusion, given the unique depth and rigor  of GiveWell's r... (read more)

Great, thanks so much!

Does Open Phil have any plans to re-open applications for early-career funding for work on biosecurity, as well (sometime in the next 12 months, say)?

Yeah, I mean, to be clear, my impression was that Yglesias wished this weren't required and believed that it shouldn't be required (certainly, in the abstract, it doesn't have to be), but nonetheless, it seemed like he conceded that from a practical standpoint, when this is what all your staff expect, it is required. I guess maybe then the question is just whether he could "avoid the pitfalls from his time with Vox," and I suppose my feeling is that one should expect that to be difficult and that someone in his position wouldn't want to abandon their quiet... (read more)

Yeah, I guess the impression I had (from comments he made elsewhere — on a podcast, I think) was that he actually agreed with his managers that at a certain point, once a publication has scaled enough, people who represent its “essence” to the public (like its founders) do need to adopt a more neutral, nonpartisan (in the general sense) voice that brings people together without stirring up controversy, and that it was because he agreed with them about this that he decided to step down.

I would be extremely surprised if he had any interest in doing this, given what he’s said about his reasons for leaving Vox.

https://kalshi.com/

Yeah, I think it’s very plausible that career RAs could yield meaningful productivity gains in organizations that differ structurally from “traditional” academic research groups, including, importantly, many EA research institutions. I think this depends a lot on the kinds of research that these organizations are conducting (in particular, the methods being employed and the intended audiences of published work), how the senior researchers’ jobs are designed, what the talent pipeline looks like, etc., but it’s certainly at least plausible that this could be... (read more)

I actually think full-time RA roles are very commonly (probably more often than not?) publicly advertised. Some fields even have centralized job boards that aggregate RA roles across the discipline, and on top of that, there are a growing number of formalized predoctoral RA programs at major research universities in the U.S. I am actually currently working as an RA in an academic research group that has had roles posted on the 80,000 Hours job board. While I think it is common for students to approach professors in their academic program and request RA wor... (read more)

For the last few years, I’ve been an RA in the general domain of ~economics at a major research university, and I think that while a lot of what you’re saying makes sense, it’s important to note that the quality of one’s experience as an RA will always depend to a very significant extent on one’s supervising researcher. In fact, I think this dependency might be just about the only thing every RA role has in common. Your data points/testimonials reasonably represent what it’s like to RA for a good supervisor, but bad supervisors abound (at least/especially ... (read more)

This discussion reminds of a comment R.M. Hare made in his 1957 essay “Nothing Matters”:

Think of one world into whose fabric values are objectively built; and think of another in which those values have been annihilated. And remember that in both worlds the people in them go on being concerned about the same things - there is no difference in the 'subjective' concern which people have for things, only in their 'objective' value. Now I ask, What is the difference between the states of affairs in these two worlds? Can any other answer be given except 'None

While not exactly the same, EA researchers are already doing something quite similar: https://givingmultiplier.org/.

That makes perfect sense! I agree that CE probably isn't the best fit for people most interested in doing EA work to mitigate existential risks. Feel free to shoot me a DM if you'd ever like to talk any of this through at greater length, but otherwise, it seems to me like you're approaching these decisions in a very sensible way.

Happy to help! Another thing that strikes me is that in my experience (which is in the U.S.), running an academic research team at a university (i.e., being the principal investigator on the team's grants) seems to have a lot in common with running a startup (you have a lot of autonomy/flexibility in how you spend your time; your efficacy is largely determined by how good you are at coordinating other people's efforts and setting their priorities for them; you spend a lot of time coordinating with external stakeholders and pitching your value-add; you have... (read more)

It sounds based on your description that a fairly straightforward step would be for you to try to set up calls with 1) someone on the Charity Entrepreneurship leadership team, and 2) some of the founders of their incubated charities. This would help you to evaluate whether it would be a good idea for you to apply to the CE program at some point, as well as to refine your sense of which aspects of entrepreneurship you’re particularly suited to (so that if entrepreneurship doesn’t work out—maybe you discover other aspects of it that seem less appealing—you’l... (read more)

That seems like a sound line of reasoning to me — best of luck with the rest of your degree!

I think this is a really hard question, and the right answer to it likely depends to a very significant degree on precisely what you’re likely to want to do professionally in the near and medium-term. I recently graduated from a top U.S. university, and my sense is that the two most significant benefits I reaped from where I went to school were:

1. Having that name brand on my resume definitely opened doors for me when applying for jobs during my senior year. I’m actually fairly confident that I would not have gotten my first job out of college had I gone to a

I really like this. To me, it emphasizes that moral reason is a species of practical reason more generally and that the way moral reasons make themselves heard to us is through the generic architecture of practical reasoning. More precisely: Acting in a manner consistent with one's moral duties is not about setting one's preferences aside and living a life of self-denial; it's about being sufficiently attentive to one's moral world that one's preferences naturally evolve in response to sound moral reasons, such that satisfying those preferences and fulfilling one's duties are one and the same.

This is a fascinating argument — thank you for sharing it! I think it's particularly interesting to consider it in the context of metaethical theories that don't fall neatly within the realist paradigm but share some of its features, like R.M. Hare's universal prescriptivism (see Freedom and Reason [1963] and Moral Thinking [1981]). However, I also think this probably shouldn't lead most discounting realists to abandon their moral view. My biggest issue with the argument is that I suspect (though I am still thinking this through) that there exist parallel ... (read more)

Glad to hear it helped! Of course, usual caveats apply about the possibility that your field is quite different from mine, so I wouldn't stop looking for advice here, but hopefully, this gives you a decent starting point!

Regarding the data-driven policy path, my sense is that unfortunately, most policy work in the U.S. today is not that data-driven, though there's no doubt that that's in part attributable to human capital constraints. Two exceptions do come to mind, though:

1. Macroeconomic stabilization policy (which is one of Open Philanthropy's priority areas) definitely fits the bill. Much of the work on this in the U.S. occurs in the research and statistics and forecasting groups of various branches of the Federal Reserve System (especially New York, the Board of Governor

I think a lot of the day-to-day feelings of fulfillment in high-impact jobs come from either: 1) being part of a workplace community of people who really believe in the value of the work, or 2) seeing first-hand the way in which your work directly helped someone. I don't really think the feelings of fulfillment typically come from the particular functional category of your role or the set of tasks that you perform during the workday, so I wonder how informative your experiments with data science, for instance, would be with respect to the question of ident... (read more)