All of Julia_Wise's Comments + Replies

I admire your drive to help others!
I do think early in my life I underweighted shopping around because I was so focused on frugality (and it's easy to be discouraged when job searches take a long time). Best wishes as you explore the options.

I appreciate you helping others learn from your experiences, and I'm sorry they were difficult ones. Thank you for flagging the risks here.

I don't think this is correct; most of the US doesn't have any age limit on informal jobs like babysitting and yard work. It's typically legal for children of any age to work for their parents' business. My ten-year-old is sometimes keen to earn money by washing windows or raking leaves for our neighbors, and I don't see anything wrong with this as long as she can opt out when she wishes.

The ability to schedule when you want (as opposed to a therapist who only has a slot at 2:30 on Thursdays) is another benefit, especially compared to in-person therapy you need to travel to. I have a pet peeve about studies that don't count the cost to beneficiaries of taking time off work, or whatever else they'd be doing with their time, to travel to and from an appointment during the workday.

There are no whistleblower systems in place at any major EA orgs as far as I know

I’ve heard this claim repeatedly, but it’s not true that EA orgs have no whistleblower systems. 

I looked into this as part of this project on reforms at EA organizations: Resource on whistleblowing and other ways of escalating concerns

• Many organizations in EA have whistleblower policies, some of which are public in their bylaws (for example, GiveWell and ACE publish their whistleblower policies among other policies). EV US and EV UK have whistleblower

I'm not sure if anybody ever figured out how much the authors of this paper were joking. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-2114430/Save-planet-genetically-engineering-humans-smaller-suggests-NYU-philosopher.html

Thank you for writing this up! 
It's helpful that you flag that the large majority of studies are done in the US. I would find it helpful in discussing interventions if the location is flagged more - for example, the cash transfers intervention is in rural Kenya. My impression is that these interventions don't generalize well across different settings.
 

Love this topic!

>Do these interventions lead to a permanent reduction in family size, or a temporary one?

Note that even if total number of children ends up the same, there are benefits to spacing children by at least 18 months in terms of health (mother has more chance to recover between pregnancies, mother and baby are better nourished, better care for older siblings). Families may also be able to better afford to educate children who are more widely spaced.

This isn't relevant to all the impacts, you list, though — still worth thinking about those separately!

Does "before/after" mean the kids came before the Nobel, or the Nobel came before the kids? (probably what you want is the work that earned the Nobel, which is harder to time.)

I'd also guess it's confounded by more intense careers and people who are more dedicated to spending a lot of time at work. I doubt you change outcomes much by taking a shorter leave, once your personality and career are already a given.

I did laugh at this — it's a helpful strategy for your career if you'd by default be doing more than half, and anti-helpful if not!

I could imagine benefits to overall productivity across the couple by allocating to whoever can most spare the time. When our childcare falls through, my husband and I work out who will handle what based on the timing of our meetings, who's done more lately, etc, rather than it defaulting to the mother.

I keep thinking about this post. Thank you for the work you're doing, and for writing up this effort and your learnings.

I hadn't read this at the time I wrote the post, but an excerpt from Ricki Heicklen's piece in the "Mistakes" issue of Asterisk Magazine:
 

In January 2022, I decided to leave my job at Jane Street Capital to move to the Bahamas and take a job as a generalist at a new crypto firm funded by Sam Bankman-Fried. In the weeks that followed, I had three strokes of good luck:

a) I talked to a family friend, a lawyer familiar with financial fraud, who expressed alarm about various details of my new job. From our conversations, I made a list of a few dozen questi

A thought on joy in righteousness:
I haven't read anything by Benjamin Lay, and have no idea how he felt about his actions. But during my more intensely Quaker stage I read the writings of John Woolman, another weirdo vegetarian Quaker who was ardently abolitionist before it was cool. I went in thinking, "It's one thing for someone who kind of enjoys being disruptive, but I'm not like that, I find it really embarrassing and uncomfortable." But in his diary he's clear that he also found it embarrassing and uncomfortable, would have liked to lead a more normal life, and pushed through because of his convictions.

Thanks for your question, Tiresias. We appreciate people coming to us with concerns, and we absolutely don't want to disincentive people from doing so. And we know that people usually aren’t at their best when they’re in the midst of stressful situations.

However, we don't think it’s a workable policy to promise never to take action against people who come to us. Many concerns we get involve two or more people who each have complaints about the other's actions. In those cases, we don't want to unfairly advantage the side of the person who raises the topic with us first. Or there could be a concern separate from the problem the person reported. So we have to balance these two considerations.

As we got more caseworkers, practices like getting input / sanity-checking from other caseworkers and managers on important cases have been helpful in a variety of situations.

Thanks — yes, we've done this in some cases.

I’m sorry I didn’t handle this better in the first place. My original comments are here, but to reiterate some of the mistakes I think I made in handling the concerns about Owen:

• I wish I had asked the various women for permission to get a second opinion from a colleague or to hand the case over to a colleague. 
• In the case where Owen told me he believed he’d made someone uncomfortable, I wish I had reached out to the woman to get her side of the story (if she was willing to share that). This would have given me a clearer picture of some of his act

Yep, that's all true. I think what I'm pointing to is that de facto people do decide what to pay attention to and what arguments to dig into based on arbitrary factors and tribalism. Ideally I'd have had some less arbitrary way to decide where to focus my attention, but here we are.

Nice! I'm adding to this list of syllabi and teaching materials.

Figures on vegetarian/vegan recidivism indicate that a lot of people stop even after years of following that diet. ACE estimates that vegetarians stay vegetarian for about 5 years on average.

The Fauanalytics survey indicates quicker dropout: about a third drop out within 3 months, about half drop out within a year, and 84% drop out in total.

You make a lot of fair points here, and we've grappled with these questions a lot.

There are some references here to the community health team’s practices that we think aren’t fully accurate. You can see more here about how we typically handle situations where we hear an accusation (or multiple accusations) and don’t have permission to discuss it with the accused.

True, I hadn't properly looked at the amount of the agricultural disruption that was due to interventions.

the idea that essential workers would stay at home while society breaks down around them is implausible to me. I would welcome evidence to change my mind here, but that case has not been made.

I think Ebola in 2014 is an example. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8797032/
"The epidemic killed and drove out many farmers, leading to the abandonment of fields whose plantations turned into rotten food. . . . disruptions in markets and in the processing and distribution chains of agri-food products exposed nearly one million people to food insecurity [... (read more)

I love these kinds of writeups! Thank you for sharing your process and how you've found it so far!

I'm sure it's true that a different group of people would have come up with different projects that seemed most useful and practical to them. I don't remember noticing disagreement that seemed to be along demographic lines. My perception is that the main axis on which we often had different ideas was "centralization vs decentralization", for example with Ozzie often proposing more centralization and me leaning toward decentralization. My hunch is this is related to Ozzie's experience at small organizations and my experience at a larger (for EA) one.

[I'm married to Jeff.] As a counterpoint, around the same time Jeff was figuring out some of this earning to give stuff, I was having a crisis about whether I should also go into earning to give. I just couldn't think of any high-earning career I thought I would be ~happy in, so I stuck with social work. And then it turned out that my skills were a lot more useful in EA community work than I had anticipated.

Lots of props to the team - I admire the work that went in here.

This seems really valuable!
There could be lessons learned from hospital initiatives around hand hygiene, where there were big cultural aspects (like doctors aren't expecting nurses to tell them what to do.)

Copenhagen Consensus has some older work on what might be cost-effective to preventing armed conflicts, like this paper.

We don't have immediate plans to do another one, but do think it would be valuable to do at some point.

Hi, you can read examples in this list of 12 months of cases we handled.

Julia here from the community health team. As you might guess, we have a pretty different view on some of Ben's takes about our team. There are a variety of things that make this difficult to discuss publicly; we'll see if we can say more at some point. For now, we wanted to say that we're following the conversation and thinking a lot about these questions. 

Thank you for sharing this! Here's a guide that includes links to some other codes of conduct from EA groups.

A list of some pieces on a related topic: April 2023 compilation on mental health and the alignment problem

They're somewhat more fiddly - if the rubber gasket cracks or if the pressure regulator knob gets lost (on an old style one) it just becomes a normal pot. Worst case the valve gets blocked and it explodes.

There might be something useful here: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/Y8mBXCKmkS9eBokhG/ea-syllabi-and-teaching-materials 

One guess is that it occupies your cooking pot for a lot longer. So you could soak beans for the evening meal during the day, but you may need that pot to make other meals during the day. (But beans could be soaked in a different container like a plastic tub or bucket.)

Lots of good wishes for your personal journey and for this project!

My experience in EA is that people who eventually become your funder or your boss were your peers / people you saw around the community a few years before.

Thanks for starting this!
This is one of the areas where EA's community aspect and professional aspect may have some conflicts. I think people joining should expect some possibility of stigma e.g. from future employers and colleagues. (Not because I have any specific knowledge of this happening in EA, but just seems like a thing that happens in the world.)
Making pseudonymous accounts might be a good idea.

Is Robert Burns' poem "To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough, November, 1785" one of the earliest writings on wild animal welfare?

Maybe he meant it mostly as a joke. (Poetry is a medium for fancy people, he's a not-fancy guy plowing a field, addressing an even-less fancy-being: a mouse.) But I kind of think he meant it? He also wrote about "poor people are good, actually," and I like that he was thinking about the even-less-powerful creature he'd just rendered homeless.

"I'm truly sorry man's dominion,
Has broken nature's social union,
An'... (read more)

Props for writing candidly about your experience here. Sending you good wishes on your journey!

For anybody interested in setting up a discussion group for EAs in recovery: here's some advice starting/running online discussion groups I put together a while ago. (Mostly about FB groups but mostly applicable to other platforms.)
The EA Peer Support group is another existing space.

Thanks for writing this out - I've referred back to this several times in the last month! 
I think there are some practical hitches as Jason points out, but I think there's worthwhile stuff in the spaces of "making it easier to find information about what people's options are for raising a problem" and "more alternatives to existing resources."

I interpreted it in a more literal way, like it's just true that anyone can literally call themselves part of EA. That doesn't mean other people consider it accurate.

(General question, not necessarily for Will in particular)
Re getting another regrants program started: has there been a look at how this went with Future Fund's regranting program? I viewed it as pretty experimental, and I don't have much sense of whether someone's looked at the pros and cons of that system. Obviously that project came to a sudden end, so I understand why any planned analysis didn't happen as planned.

Thanks for raising these concerns.

I really don’t want this project to mean that other projects on reform don’t happen!

The large EA organizations I’ve talked to have been taking their own looks at changes in some of these same areas. I think there could also be valuable projects led from outside the major organizations. As you point out, people and organizations will always have limitations based on their own interests and viewpoints. I think it’s important for different efforts to fill in each other’s gaps.

About the overlap between this project and the com... (read more)