All of ozymandias's Comments + Replies

I think that relevant context for backlash against Davis Kingsley's anti-polyamory views is that he is an orthodox Catholic. His anti-polyamory views are part of a set of fairly extreme views about sexuality, including being opposed to homosexuality, masturbation, contraception, premarital sex, and any sexual intercourse other than PIV. He has also expressed the viewpoint that polyamory should be socially stigmatized and people should be pressured into monogamy. I believe that much, perhaps most, of the backlash he has faced is due to the overall set of hi... (read more)

The Economist article discusses the practice of widespread polygyny: that is, men who have multiple wives and whose wives are only married to them. As a matter of mathematics, polygyny (without polyandry) means that many men will stay unmarried, which makes them less connected to society and more likely to behave violently. That argument seems true to me.  

However, the argument hardly seems applicable to the egalitarian polyamory almost always practiced by effective altruists. Poly female effective altruists can and do date multiple people. Further, m... (read more)

Don't worry, I'm robust to bad comments on the EA Forum. :) Fortunately, this doesn't seem to be a norm anywhere close to being adopted. 

I don't understand why bad actors who are already willing to harass women wouldn't be willing to cheat on their wives. I also don't understand why we can't just stigmatize people hitting on their employees, if that is the thing we actually care about. Your proposed system has no advantages if the senior men are single or serially monogamous-- both very common.  

Your language also strikes me as oddly and unnecessarily gendered. It isn't exactly better if a senior woman is hitting on a younger, vulnerable man! Effective altruists are much more LGBT+ than the general population, and poly effective altruists even more so; it seems to me to be a very incomplete analysis to assume that everyone is heterosexual. 

I have been harassed by many monogamous men but if I posted on the LW forum saying "I was harassed by many monogamous men" I would expect a lot of pushback from people who-- very sensibly-- would think I was trying to stigmatize monogamy. 

There are places for unendorsed venting. Those places are not the Less Wrong forum. 

ETA: I'm guessing from comments of yours I read elsewhere that you didn't mean to come off as anti-poly as you did to me and Amber, and I'm sorry if my comment came off hostile. I know I've definitely written things that came off in ways I didn't intend. :) 

As a queer person, it definitely makes me feel unwelcome to hear people suggest that the social movement I'm part of gets to have an opinion on my consensual relationship choices. 

An interesting counterexample to some of your points is the Disney Renaissance, generally considered to be the golden age of Disney animation, which started fifty years after Disney began animating films. AIUI, the conventional wisdom is that there happened to be a confluence of incredible talents: in particular, Howard Ashman and Alan Menken  were an incredible songwriting duo. The Renaissance was also when the iconic Disney princess line was invented. Before the Renaissance, Disney happened to have made films about princesses, but it wasn't a distin... (read more)

Just a point on inclusiveness: throughout this post, you implicitly assume that the average effective altruist is a heterosexual man-- the sort of person who would find a girlfriend at EA Global, has Will MacAskill as his competition, and who might tell cute girls about the drowning child thought experiment. That kind of thing tends to be really alienating to women and LGBT+ people reading! It's the same way you would feel kind of alienated if you read a post assuming that you are a woman and you'd be getting a boyfriend at EA Global. One easy wa... (read more)

Thank you! You're right. That's absolutely a flaw. In the future, when I write things like this, I'll try to be more careful about highlighting that both I and my conservative friends are American and I can't speak to other countries.

Hiring someone to watch my kid instead of trying to work during naps and in the evenings.

Getting pregnant may cause insomnia both while you're pregnant and postpartum (even if someone else is taking care of the baby or you've sleep-trained the baby).

At all times, I have a set of topics to think about during downtime, such as showers and walks. (I try to include several different topics, including at least one piece of fiction I'm writing.) If I can't sleep, I lie still in bed and think about one of my topics. I find I get a lot of creative insight, I avoid anxious ruminating, and I often drift off back to sleep.

Don't drink caffeine late in the afternoon, and if you use stims or other insomnia-causing medication try to take them as early as possible.

I do not intend Near-Term EAs to be participants' only space to talk about effective altruism. People can still participate on the EA forum, the EA Facebook group, local EA groups, Less Wrong, etc. There is not actually any shortage of places where near-term EAs can talk with far-future EAs.

Near-Term EAs has been in open beta for a week or two while I ironed out the kinks. So far, I have not found any issues with people being unusually closed-minded or intolerant of far-future EAs. In fact, we have several participants who identify as cause-agnostic and at least one who works for a far-future organization.

The EA community climate survey linked in the EA survey has some methodological problems. When academics study sexual harassment and assault, it's generally agreed upon that one should describe specific acts (e.g. "has anyone ever made you have vaginal, oral, or anal sex against your will using force or a threat of force?") rather than vague terms like harassment or assault. People typically disagree on what harassment and assault mean, and many people choose not to conceptualize their experiences as harassment or assault. (This is particularly t... (read more)

If we're ignoring getting the numbers right and instead focusing on the emotional impact, we have no claim to the term "effective". This sort of reasoning is why epistemics around dogooding are so bad in the first place.

I'd be interested in an elaboration on why you reject expected value calculations.

My personal feeling is that expected-value calculations with very small probabilities are unlikely to be helpful, because my calibration for these probabilities is very poor: a one in ten million chance feels identical to a one in ten billion chance for me, even though their expected-value implications are very different. But I expect to be better-calibrated on the difference between a one in ten chance and a one in a hundred chance, particularly if-- as is true much of the ... (read more)

IIRC, Open Phil often wants to not be a charity's only funder, which means they leave the charity with a funding gap that could maybe be filled by the EA Fund.

Well, yes, anyone can come up with all sorts of policy ideas. If a person has policy expertise in a particular field, it allows them to sort out good policies from bad ones, because they are more aware of possible negative side effects and unintended consequences than an uninformed person is. I don't think the fact that a person endorses a particular policy means that they haven't thought about other policies.

Is your claim that Chloe Cockburn has failed to consider policy ideas associated with the right-wing, and thus has not done her due diligence to know that what she recommends is actually the best course? If so, what is your evidence for this claim?

I don't think it would be wise to try and specify and defend that abstract claim in the same post as talking about a specific situation. I take it as given, at least here. Perhaps I will do a followup, but I think it would be hard to do the topic justice in, say, 5-10 hours which is what I realistically have.

I am confused. If you took it as given, why bother talking about whether Alliance for Safety and Justice and Cosecha are good charities? It surely doesn't matter if someone is good at doing something that you think they shouldn't be doing in the fir... (read more)

I am perhaps confused about what your claim is. Do you mean to say "Chloe Cockburn does not have expertise except in the facts of the law and being a left-wing anti-Trump activist"? Or "Chloe Cockburn has a good deal of expertise in fields relevant to the best possible way to reduce mass incarceration, but her opinion is sadly biased because she has liberal political opinions"?

Regarding her Twitter, I think Chloe Cockburn might have an informed opinion that reducing deportations of undocumented immigrants would reduce incarceration (thr... (read more)

This post seems to me to move somewhat incoherently between:

• effective altruist charity suggestion lists should not endorse political charities.
• effective altruist charity suggestion lists should specifically not endorse anti-racist and pro-undocumented-immigrant charities.
• there is not sufficient evidence to suggest that Alliance for Safety and Justice and Cosecha in specific are effective.

I think dividing these three claims more clearly would make it easier for me to follow your argument.

It would also be more persuasive, for me, if you elaborated mor... (read more)

I am uncertain why someone would choose to figure out what other people's area of expertise is from Twitter. Most people's Twitters contain their political opinions-- as you point out-- and do not contain their CV.

If you look at her LinkedIn, which seems to me to be a more appropriate source of information about her expertise, you'll discover that in addition to being the current program officer at OpenPhil specializing in criminal justice (which is presumably why she was asked), she was also a former advocacy and policy counsel for the ACLU specializing ... (read more)

I've also found that sorbet hits the sweet + cold buttons and I tend to find it tastier than soy or rice milk ice cream.