All of Lauren Gilbert's Comments + Replies

Agree on housing, disagree on NHS: https://www.laurenpolicy.com/p/uk-immigration-and-public-services

It seems this pathway no longer exists?

I would say "having roughly similar migration as several other rich countries" does mean not "open borders", as I think few people would claim that open borders is currently the state of entrance into most rich countries. (Certainly, as an immigrant in the UK, it has not been my experience.)

In answer to those points:

About one in four UK tourist visas is refused, which does not seem that easy. The UK has a relatively small number of migrants that arrive by sea, compared to other European countries with a long coastline. About half of asylum applications are... (read more)

Update: I have edited, and added a footnote saying you corrected me, linking to this comment, and noting that I offered you a bug bounty.

You're correct that I accidentally used the 2023 work visa total instead of 2024 work visa total.

I'll edit. As per my bug bounty policy, I'll also donate $10 to a charity of your choice: https://www.laurenpolicy.com/p/announcing-a-bug-bounty-for-this

That being said, I am relatively unconcerned about the fiscal effects of this given 1) dependents are allowed to work in the UK (unlike in the US), 2) cohort wages look decent through 2023, and 3) labor force participation for non-UK born remains higher than for the UK born (through 2025). 

So was I, tbh! It is also possible that there are more studies but they are in French and I cannot read them.

Responded on Substack!

1. I am not sure how to prove to you that people need income in the United States.
2. As I say below, they say: "We found no impact on the overall likelihood of Germans to be victimized in a crime".  That is, refugees were not any likelier than Germans to commit crimes against Germans.  I said: "In Germany, refugees were not particularly likely to commit crimes against Germans".  I have accurately reported their results.
3. I discuss below why simple descriptive statistics are insufficient to tell you if a group commits more crime than other groups.

They say: "We found no impact on the overall likelihood of Germans to be victimized in a crime".  That is, refugees were not any likelier than Germans to commit crimes against Germans.

I said: "In Germany, refugees were not particularly likely to commit crimes against Germans".  I have accurately reported their results.

Furthermore, in a post I am working on now, I will discuss why such charts - I look at one simply comparing the % of of a given ethnicity in prison to the % in a population - do not tell you all that much:

"We might overestimat... (read more)

1. From Portes and Stepnick 1985: "The federal government's refusal to grant either group political asylum deprived them of benefits under the new 1980 Refugee Act. Although subsequent congressional action alleviated this situation, emergency aid was limited and most of it lapsed by 1983. Lacking either jobs or government assistance, many refugees were compelled to rely on private charity or to invent jobs in a burgeoning "informal" economy in Miami."  So technically, they received some aid - I'll edit accordingly, thanks for the flag - but considerably

I haven't seen a lot of evidence on other kinds of peacekeepers, so I don't know that I can say with confidence how effective they are!  I would guess it depends on how much they are seen as a neutral third party.

More the latter - I think it's hard to influence the UN, especially if you need security council sign off.  Really, you have to influence every country on the security council to agree to more peacekeeping, and also come up with more funding somewhere, and UN bureaucracy is famously difficult and impenetrable.

Would I love to redesign UN peacekeeping to focus more on rule of law and less on soldiers?  Absolutely.  Do I think there's much possibility to do that?  Not really no.

Yes, I thought that was what you meant but wanted to be clear - I very much don't think that GiveWell should start recommending the UN.  ;)

I should note - I don't think peacekeeping is anywhere near as cost-effective as GiveWell's top interventions!

My (very quick, rough) BOTEC on peacekeeping in 2022 had it about half as good as GiveDirectly (see the civil conflict shallow and associated BOTEC).  Peacekeeping should not be an EA cause area.  Getting the UN to focus more on peacekeeping and less on other functions?  That might pencil, since it's leveraged (though I am very uncertain on that).

Also a longer response: I do think the lack of demand is worrying and could be suggestive that these studies are not showing real world effects.  I haven't spent enough time in rural Kenya to know how hard it is to get glasses, but I am updating based on what you say!

I do think it is easy to underestimate how bad your vision has gotten and not use glasses you need.  Personally, I have failed to notice that my prescription has gotten out of date and continued to use old glasses, and then finally get around to getting new ones and I do notice a pro... (read more)

Very interested to see it when it's done!  Always happy to update my thoughts based on new evidence.

Open New York is a c(4) (as noted in the writeup above).

This is not an object-level comment, but great to see you on the Forum, JueYan!

As the friend in question, I would like to second Gemma's comment and endorse the idea that EA should take engagement with disability more seriously.

This is just a comment to say how much Sam's colleagues appreciate him, and how much he has added to Open Philanthropy over the last year.

OK, but we should legit have an EAGxKampala.  (Or possibly Kigali or Nairobi or Dar, but EAGxEast Africa.)

Marginal costs, and yes, you are completely correct.

Life satisfaction for people with disabilities has been well studied.  It is lower than people without disabilities (in most cases), but is not zero.

(A handful of sources to start with: paper on disabled people in Germany that shows happiness recovers after disability, paper on Spanish people with intellectual disabilities shows they are largely satisfied with their lives, the average life satisfaction of people with disabilities in Northern Ireland is 7/10, across EU member states it's between 6.2 and 7 out of ten.)

You're right; I misread Susannah's tweet (and read the "ever" bar as "in school").

Re. the Wikipedia article: those are ever harassed numbers; the Zambia number is within the last year.  Assuming that sexual harassment is spread across all grades (K-12), "within the last year" (81/12) would be ~7% (which is how I got a quarter of the 26% I quote, though you're right that I was misreading the tweet).  Upon further thought, dividing by 12 is a little aggressive, since sexual harassment is more likely in last six years of that (grades 6-12), so say, ... (read more)

I agree with this comment.  While less than 0.5% of American students face corporal punishment at school, some 70% of African students do.  In school deaths are not incredibly uncommon. 

26% of Zambian girls have been sexually abused in the last year.  About 10% of Zambian boys and girls report having been sexually harassed at school within the last month.

Is it possible for visit for a shorter time than 12 weeks?

Yes, we also came to the conclusion that firm electrification > household electrification.  My comment was meant as a gentle suggestion that perhaps electricity access is not the highest ROI margin.  ;)

FWIW, I found much higher ROI from improving quality of electricity access (e.g. reducing the number of blackouts; based pretty heavily on this paper from Fried and Lagakos) than from improving the quantity of electricity supplied.

Re. the intimidation factor: I regularly write for an audience of ~1.3M people.  I found posting on the EA forum much more intimidating.

I am much more likely to get criticism in response to an EA forum post than elsewhere.  This is good in terms of robustness of ideas, but it also means I am never going to dash off a post quickly.

You may want to disambiguate Great Lakes region - I had a moment where I was confused if you meant Ohio or Uganda.

Re. military service AND a PhD: we had a handful of active-duty people go through my PhD.  They had three years to write their PhD - which is very short, and meant they did not write an academic-quality dissertation.  (They all stayed in the military and went on to their next post; I do not think they regret not being academics.). That might be fine for you!  But it's worth bearing in mind that if you are interested in an academic job, using military service for funding probably won't get you one.

I will confirm this and also say that if your PhD does not provide funding, you should not go.  This also applies to PhDs that don't provide enough funding to live (though this may eliminate a few good schools - I'm not sure either Isabel's alma mater (UCLA) or mine (UCSD) provide stipends that make sense relative to housing costs.)

As far as I am aware, it is not true.  Given most health conditions are rare, and even common health conditions are experienced by a minority of the population, DALY and QALY valuations are mostly produced by people with no lived experience of the condition they are ranking.

Two very quick notes:

1. It's Caltech, no space.
2. As someone who went to Caltech (and turned down a couple of Ivys), I think EA's focus on top tier schools is very weird and missing a lot of talent.

Edited to add: my MS and MA are from a less elite school (UCSD).  I've tried to convince more of my friends from UCSD to apply to jobs at Open Phil than I have Caltech friends.

Oh, that's really interesting.  I've passed this along to the team.

When we spoke to experts in the field, this was not a major concern for them.  Indeed, a couple mentioned that often convincing people to use a development intervention is an uphill battle - but people needed no convincing to use cell phones.

This seems to be borne out by usage statistics; even though devices are expensive (44% of monthly income is a lot), usage is growing a lot.  GSMA has smartphone usage doubling in sub-Saharan Africa doubling from 2014-2019 (pg. 17).  World Bank research suggests the major barrier entry to using a mobile d... (read more)

It looks like my footnote on Starlink didn't make it over the forum version; will fix that!  In the interim, these are my thoughts: "in the near future, satellites in low orbit will make it possible to access broadband in almost all parts of the world in the near future. However, satellite internet is quite pricey. Starlink terminals are currently $500 loss-leaders for the company, plus a monthly cost of $99. While this makes coverage possible throughout the world, it does not mean that this is actually useful to the majority of the world (let alone t... (read more)

Update: I texted an astrophysicist friend about including code in arxiv postings and got back "EXTREMELY GOOD"

Yes!  Political science often uses SSRN, but SSRN is... worse than the arxiv and doesn't really do a daily digest of relevant papers (the astro-ph mailing list is every astrophysicist's way of staying up to date with literature).  Preprints sometimes go on author's websites, sometimes get linked on Twitter, it's just not centralized. 

Econ has the same problem - there is an econ-gn category on the arxiv, but not a category for, say, crime, or health, or gender.  Some preprints are on NBER, some are on IZA, some are on SSRN, etc.

Oh my god, if you let people include code in their preprints, you will be every astrophysicist's favorite FOREVER.

I would love to see the arxiv expand to other disciplines that love preprints.  I think centralizing the scattered social science preprint sphere would be doing good for science!  (I am an ex-physicist turned political scientist, and I miss the arxiv so much.)

also, I would love if the arxiv had a good export to .bib file rather than just a copy-paste .bib formatted text, so I didn't have to click through to the ADS to generate a .bib file.  It would save me quite a few seconds.  ;)

Oh, hi, stranger.  ;)

Yes, we've been thinking about this a bit.  In this version of the model, I assumed recovery to trend within 10 years, but honestly, that's incredibly unrealistic.  We're likely to revise our model to use a substantially longer time scale for recovery.

On a related note, if people reading this are interested in political economy & GHW, feel free to email me to chat about the advantages/disadvantages of being in a political science department instead of an econ department.

Policing reform is a topic near and dear to my heart, so I am happy to talk about this ad nauseam.  One of the papers in my now-on-pause dissertation was on policing, and I also RAed on a study on community policing in the Global South.  (It didn't work.)

I agree that better policing is desperately needed in the developing world; functionally, there really aren't police in much of the world.  But I don't know that the literature is yet mature enough for this kind of overview; policing in the developing world has really only taken off as a res... (read more)

Oh, that's a valid point about scaling; noted.

Re. job training: I was referring to Blattman and Annan 2016, where the intervention contained both counseling and job training.

Very excited to see the ten year results when they're out!  

I wish there was more data on this!  There is very little systematic data collection on refugees and IDPs in the Global South.  I had trouble finding data on physical health - e.g. life expectancy for those displaced by civil war - and well-being data was even thinner on the ground.  I even tweeted about how much I wanted this data to exist.  ;)

I certainly expect that experiencing or being displaced by civil war has substantially negative effects on well-being - this paper shows the effects persist for at least three decades - but I did... (read more)

You might also find Arroyo-Abad and Maurer's review of the persistence literature interesting.