All of ruthgrace's Comments + Replies

In writing this, I drew heavily from a book: Prison Break: Why Conservatives Turned Against Mass Incarceration, by David Dagan and Steven M. Teles

You may find this helpful as a primer on how reform actually gets passed and implemented, in addition to Mark Kleiman's work about what should be done.

I think that sometimes when someone has a good experience with a mediator they doubt that it's possible for other people to have bad experiences. Also Aurora is actually on this forum and messaged me to ask if I wanted to do a session so she can listen to the impact she's had on me and I absolutely do not. If you mention that you had a negative experience with her, she might message you too, so watch out.

Yup, and specifically in Aurora's case, low ability to empathize with others who aren't her friends, and low ability to recognize that she should not be mediating a situation where she's friends or dating one of the parties and not close with the other.

I have had a terrible mediation experience with her where she was friends with the other party and not friends with me. This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties. Do not let her mediate anything. I saw once that she specializes in or was looking to help survivors of sexual assault. Stay away from this person.

6
orellanin
1y
This comment is currently at -6 agreement votes. Does anyone want to explain to me why this is so?

This tracks with the Time Mag reporting where she did a mediation while dating one of the parties.

Maybe? The article has " Quinn-Elmore told TIME, adding that although she spoke to both parties and recommended a path forward, she didnt consider this to be an official mediation."

Yes, I do think that most parents in the bay area are too nervous about taking care of other people's kids (maybe it gets better when the kids are 6+ years old and people are more willing to e.g. drop them off at birthday parties where the parents leave). It also requires a certain type of personality to be okay with whatever parenting style your friends or loved ones have when they are taking care of your kids for free, and be OK with their diet, nap schedule, etc slipping while you're gone.

basically nobody besides grandparents or people you pay seems to be interested in helping take care of children in modern Western society.

I feel like this is more true in the Bay area than in other places. Not sure why. Anyways, if you are in San Francisco and looking to make parent friends where you can have play dates at each other's houses and potentially drop off your kids at each other's houses if there's some kind of child care gap, we should be friends. I live in the Mission district and have a 3.5 and 1.5-year-old and want to build this kind of friend/support network locally.

9
Jeff Kaufman
1y
And if you're in Boston (Somerville area) and are interested in something similar let me know! (1.5y, 6y, 8y).
1
PV
1y
I second this, but even people you pay for childcare aren't that easily found (at least where we're living - Germany).  The same with this type of network/friend circle - I absolutely love the idea, but my experience is, that it's hard to build this up and it takes time. Every family is struggling, and have different rhythms (e.g. my kid's nap time is 12-2pm we can meet afterward - oh but my kid is sleeping from 1.30-3pm and then it's almost getting too late before it gets dark/dinner time/whatsoever...), you plan a play-date, and then one kid gets sick - just some examples from real life ;-) I don't want to sound too pessimistic. That's just been our experience and I wish I'd had more realistic expectations on things like that.   

Thanks so much for your reply! Yes, grandparent help can make this whole project so much more manageable. We don't have grandparents nearby but our nanny is able to take care of both kids if the preschool closes or the kids aren't feeling well, and it's a godsend.

That's very inspiring that Hilary Greaves has kids! Do you know how many?

> Do you know how many?

6 last I heard, but I might be out of date. 

I wonder if that's just the nature of earning-to-give careers? That if you do the same thing for a while just to make money that you will eventually get bored and not want to work that hard at it? Versus direct work which seems to me to be easier to feel personal fulfillment around.

9
Jeff Kaufman
1y
I'm sure this varies a lot by person: I was earning to give for ~16y and probably more motivated at the end than when I started. The longer I worked in my field the better I understood it, the more I got to be deciding what I (and later my team) worked on, and the more (non-altruistic) impact I could have.

I'm ecstatic that AMF was able to arrange for you to work part time!! I've also been surprised by what good luck I've had with being able to get very flexible part time internships during my maternity leave and being able to go part time until my baby turned one at my day job. My advice for others on this is that if you've already cultivated a previous relationship with the people you work for or want to work for, it doesn't hurt to ask for a non traditional work arrangement. And then more generally, I think that people who want to have impact and also want to have kids can sometimes find creative solutions to have both.

Hi Michelle, really appreciate you writing this out. I'm also a parent of a 3 year old (and his little brother who's 1). I hope you'll indulge me a few questions. Would you be able to say a little more about

  1. Your outside of daycare support, like how much friends or family you have nearby to help with childcare? Or other arrangements?
  2. How you and your partner ended up arranging your parental leave? How long did you have? Did you stagger your leaves? And did you go back to work full time right away at the the end of leave or did you work part time for a whi
... (read more)
9
Michelle_Hutchinson
1y
Hey Ruth!  Sure thing: 1. Thankfully, my husband's parents live an hour and a half's drive away, and have lots of space. My husband and son go there very week, staying over Friday night. Nic's parents look after Leo for much of Saturday and then Nic and Leo come home Saturday night. If Leo can't go to nursery for some reason for a few days, we all go stay there and Nic's parents help with childcare We don't currently have any other arrangements. We had a babysitter coming one evening a week for a while, but when they stopped (after about 6 months) we didn't try to find another. It was surprisingly hard to find someone reliable. We had a nanny for about 6 months during the pandemic. She was an old friend of mine, and was fantastic (but not interested in staying longer than 6 months).  2. I took 3 months. He took a month at the start alongside me, and then he took 9 months after went back to work. He took longer than he expected to because the pandemic started when Leo was 4 months. But also it turned out he liked paternity leave (whereas I didn't like maternity). I went back to work full time right away, though it took me a long time to be back to normal productivity (partly because of breastfeeding being time consuming).  3. To be clear, I do think having a child has made a difference to my expected impact - I think my expected impact is now lower. But I do think it's in the same ballpark.  I can't speak much to having multiple children since I only have one. My guess is that it would be a continuation on the same spectrum. Eg maybe if I had another child I'd go from 5.5 days a week of working to 5 days. I find it hard to know how much these increments affect longrun impact. You might think that you do the least valuable work in your marginal half day. Or it might be that there are a lot of really effective jobs that are very long hours, and so with each marginal decrease in time you're ruling out some jobs that might be really high impact. Plenty of people do

I really liked this post. I think that the author raises a good point at the end, saying that for practical purposes, all these different paradigms basically lead to wanting to keep people alive and getting the ones who have less money more money.

But I found this to be a much more intuitive framework for me personally: from a systemic change standpoint it's probably easier/cheaper to increase the mental health of rich people who have poor mental health, but more difficult to increase the wellbeing of poor people who are suffering a similar amount. Maybe no... (read more)

yes, this drives me a little bit crazy about EA. by definition "effective altruism" should include any kind of altruism that someone is trying to do effectively. But what is actually practiced by the capital letters Effective Altruism movement is actually "altruistic rationality".

As Julia Galef mentions in this 2017 EAG panel, people have three buckets through which they spend their money: personal, personal causes (e.g. the university you went to or homelessness in the city you live), and EA causes (global make-the-world-better type things). Trying to gui... (read more)

I recommend (and did a part-time internship with in the past) the Coalition on Homelessness. What really inspires me about them is that they did Prop C in 2018, where companies making over 50M per year in San Francisco were taxed a small percentage into a fund specifically for homeless exits. Before COVID, this fund was accruing 200-300M per year. The money was locked up for a few years from companies suing the city, but after the city finally won, it budgeted for 4000 homeless exits -- a 4X increase. This would have made a big dent (5000 people become hom... (read more)

1
sjsjsj
1y
Thank you!

Ah, so your perspective is not about increasing the number of future people but fighting for rights for people who you would say already exist. Just to be clear: you would support interventions that reduced unintended pregnancy before conception, such as long-acting contraceptives? The OP seems unsure on this point.

-4
Calum Miller
1y
Yes - I don't want to speak for Ariel, but my sense is that we have pretty different perspectives on why abortion is bad. I have a fairly traditional pro-life position unrelated to population ethics or utilitarian considerations. I generally think children are a good thing for various reasons, but I'm not into maximising population for population ethics reasons or anything like that. Even for LARCs I'm pretty sceptical that their promotion significantly reduces abortions except in exceptional circumstances (e.g. former soviet states where abortion was used as birth control). But I would support other interventions which, for example, hardcore pronatalists might well oppose (e.g. education encouraging delay of sexual debut, discouragement of multiple sexual partners, bans on surrogacy, etc.).

It's not too crazy; being a pregnancy surrogate is something women can get paid to do and doesn't really require any altruism. This is for an IVF baby generally, not carrying a baby with your own genetic material. The demand for babies is real. Selling eggs or sperm to gay couples trying to conceive is similar.

Edit for numbers: I think in California people pay surrogacy agencies $70,000 for everything and the women who carry the babies get about half that amount.

3
DirectedEvolution
1y
That is a fair point actually! I retract my crazytown comment.

There's a few people in the comments here openly supporting involuntary abortion reduction. I'm curious how far that kind of philosophy goes? If this is you, do you also support involuntary meat consumption reduction in low income countries? How about involuntary appropriation of people's crypto investments for EA grants...?

-3
Calum Miller
1y
Thanks for your question, Ruth. I confess to being a sucker for the liberal democracy post-WW2 human rights deontological framework, according to which involuntary abortion reduction follows from a fairly simple premise: human embryos/foetuses are human beings. If so, then according to the standard human rights framework (specifically ICCPR Article 6) they have a right to life which must be protected in law - i.e. they cannot be killed. I don't see how a comparable case can be made for the interventions you mention. I know less than nothing about crypto so really couldn't say anything at all about that. Regarding involuntary meat consumption reduction, I don't think non-human animals have a right to life so consuming meat would not be wrong for the same reasons. Whether meat consumption could reasonably/permissibly be involuntary reduced (I'm not sure why it would be specifically limited to poor countries) for other reasons depends on the facts of the case, I think. I certainly wouldn't have an in principle/absolute objection to doing so if the case for doing so (either from  climate concerns, animal suffering, or scarcity) were sufficiently strong. We rationed meat in the war and I don't think that violated any sort of inviolable right to bodily autonomy, for example.

Yes... it would be great if the criminal justice system could actually rehabilitate people rather than mostly just punishing them.

I'm pretty sure that in the way that increasing sentence lengths isn't effective for deterring crime, reducing access to abortion isn't effective for reducing STD transmission. And I'm pretty sure less family planning is related to more poverty, not less.

2
Larks
1y
The main argument is that increasing sentence length reduces crime through incapacitation, not deterrence. Even if no-one is ever deterred, if criminals are imprisoned after their first assault you have prevented the subsequent crimes. (see for example discussion here).
-1
Calum Miller
1y
I'm not sure I see the connection. The economic evidence that I've seen suggests that, pretty consistently in a wide variety of settings, increased abortion access has been responsible for pretty large increases in STI transmission (https://academic.oup.com/aler/article-abstract/14/2/457/162853). I'm not aware of any counterevidence, though there may be some.   I'm also not persuaded re: family planning. Yes, family planning can help relieve poverty in some cases. But on a wide-reaching societal level, I think the poverty that has resulted (especially among women) from family breakdown has probably more than compensated for any potential financial benefits: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2946680

I also want to note that there are wide-reaching societal effects of abortion access; this paper makes the case that the legalization of Roe V Wade in the 70s accounted for a 10% decrease in crime in the 90s (a quarter of the total crime decrease that happened in the 90s) https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf

1
Ariel Simnegar
1y
Though Calum brings some evidence in the other direction, I'd like to make it clear that I'm willing to bite the bullet on this one. I think the scale of abortion completely dominates concerns about crime rates.
4
Calum Miller
1y
I disagree more on this, though. Of course there are wide-reaching societal effects, but I think the link re: crime was pretty decisively debunked by various economists - I found Lott and Whitley's response particularly compelling: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1465-7295.2006.00040.x. I would argue that most of the other negative effects of limiting abortion access have also been highly exaggerated (I have a paper in the International Family Law Journal on this topic and happy to send to anyone interested by email). Then in addition there are considerable negative societal effects - e.g. increased STD transmission rates, increased family breakdown (and hence poverty), etc. Even aside from any consideration of the moral value of the embryo or fetus, I think there's a decent consequentialist case against abortion access.

My only disagreements with this post is that

Suspend our support for charities which reduce the amount of near-term future people until we can systematically review the effect of the above moral considerations on the morality of the charities' interventions.

Would involve involuntary abortion reduction.

I also agree with Denise that if you cared about reducing voluntary abortion or just unwanted pregnancies generally, long acting contraceptives seem the most effective way to do that. But it seems that you're not sure if unwanted pregnancies are a bad thin... (read more)

2
Ariel Simnegar
1y
Hi Ruth, great to hear from you! Here's an explanation of why I wouldn't characterize it that way. I think it's a more nuanced discussion than most give it credit for! On the one hand, pregnancy exerts a substantial cost on a woman, especially when it's unwanted. On the other hand, the child stands to live or lose an entire life's worth of hopes, joys, pains, and regrets. In an unwanted pregnancy, someone's going to have a sad outcome either way—even when giving the child up for adoption, the mother mourns the child she'll never be able to raise. The "Personal Autonomy Shouldn't Preclude Intervention" section summarizes my thoughts. On your point, I couldn't agree more, and that's why I include both of your links in the "In Our Personal Lives" section. On having more discussion of spreading the cost of children over more people than just the mother, my weakness of not yet being a parent comes through—I've always felt unqualified to talk about it! I'd love to listen to and understand more about your lived experience as a mother.
1
Calum Miller
1y
Agree entirely on the last part and I think these suggestions are very helpful. If you know of any other more in-depth discussions on these issues I'd be very grateful to see them.
9
ruthgrace
1y
I also want to note that there are wide-reaching societal effects of abortion access; this paper makes the case that the legalization of Roe V Wade in the 70s accounted for a 10% decrease in crime in the 90s (a quarter of the total crime decrease that happened in the 90s) https://pricetheory.uchicago.edu/levitt/Papers/LevittUnderstandingWhyCrime2004.pdf

I could get on board with "Climate change is not neglected, but humanity is still terrible at dealing with it with pretty severe consequences, so it makes sense for EAs who are interested or have a comparative advantage to work on it". I'm not sure if I understand the focus on Canadian policy and voters, either. I think it's because there's a lot of pieces of the puzzle between voters caring about climate change (and I think most of them do!) and humans being good at reversing climate change. For example, what does good policy look like? Does it exist alre... (read more)

ah, i guess it depends on the reliability of your health care... when i was thinking the most about this i was not in the USA. thanks, this is a good and balanced point.

Upvote for getting more people trained in biosecurity! Thanks for sharing

thank you, really love this post! i see that some of your recommendations hinge on using the bipolar diagnostic questionnaire as a diagnostic tool. I think that the questionnaire is actually part of the problem. I suspect that many people with treatment-resistant depression don't become obviously hypomanic or manic enough for the doctor to be able to diagnose bipolar type II even if they have it, and so they keep trying wrong meds for years.

I suspect that the solution to this is to update the diagnostic questionnaire to check for differences in how people ... (read more)

6
Karolina Soltys
1y
Thank you for your comment and sorry for the late response! The questionnaire that I suggest does factor in sleep patterns; agreed that it is a very meaningful symptom that needs to be factored into the diagnosis. I would strongly advise against your final suggestion though -- triggering a hypomanic episode on purpose seems like a really dangerous idea! Even if you succeeded in triggering hypomania as opposed to mania, you're unlikely to manage to get seen by a GP while in that state. If you're that desperate, it's probably safer to lie to your doctor and say you have had a hypomanic episode than actually trigger it on purpose in order to be truthful...

hehe no worries at all. it's confusing, but ruth grace has better SEO than just ruth :D

I'm super happy I finally published something substantial! I had gotten a grant to write a paper on philanthropy-driven movement building (how rich people can change public opinion and policy strategically with their money) in February. I'm still working on that paper but I got side tracked in wanting to write a better critique of open philanthropy's criminal justice reform efforts. It took SO much longer than I thought it would, but I think it turned out well. It's my first serious research-paper-like publication on this forum. Would love to hear your fee... (read more)

THIS. IS. LIFE. CHANGING. thank you thank you thank you

I think that the greatest value that this post serves is in giving young people some pause when they are relying on CEA-governed resources to try to determine how to live their life. Thank you.

9
AnonymousEAForumAccount
2y
Thanks Grace! I do think there’s a problematic degree of hero-worship (of both individuals and organizations) in the community, and would be very pleased if this post helps reduce that dynamic in any way.

A phrase that I really like to describe longtermism is "altruistic rationalty" which covers activities that are a subset of "effective altruism"

People working in producing and moving physical goods, to be able to have more impact on the physical world. I would guess that is kind of work, and starting companies to provide this kind of work is the most likely activity to bring low income countries to middle income

I love GatherTown. It's awesome to have an effective altruism space to hang out and bump into people and be inspired by chance. As if we were neighbors in real life. Agree that it's a perfect place to host intro events.

I added a new point to the main article relevant to the "skip the landline" model:

  • Innovations developed in high-income countries may have more impact in low-income countries. For example, renewable energy (wind, solar, hydro, etc) was developed in high income countries. But because of energy scarcity, investment in renewable energy has actually been higher in low and middle income countries than in high-income countries, since 2015. (see the Wikipedia article on renewable energy in developing countries)

I'm a bit confused on where you stand on this: on the one hand, you seem to be suggesting that it's not possible to derive a decent estimate on the likelihood of success, but on the other hand you are still suggesting that you think it is worth funding.

i think any estimate would have a confidence interval so wide that it would be useless. (I said "variance" before; maybe that's a less well known term)

how often do these kinds of social movements/reforms work

I think I've cited a pretty good example with the conservative legal movement. My belief is th... (read more)

5
Harrison Durland
2y
I am aware of what you mean by variance, but I don't think this challenges my point: I dispute the idea that you can both say "we can't make any useful estimate on the likelihood of success" and still claim "it's worth funding (despite any opportunity costs and other potential drawbacks)." As the rest of this comment gets into, even a really wide (initial/early-stage) confidence interval can be useful as long as the other variables involved are sufficiently large that you can credibly say "it seems very likely that the probability is at least X%,  which is enough to make this very cost effective in expectation."  (This line of reasoning is very pronounced in longtermism)   I think one crux/sticking point for me is: I believe that you could make a highly-simplistic but illustrative 3-variable plausibility model involving the following questions: * How much funding/resources should be devoted * What is the probability of achieving X outcome if we devote the above-given amount of resources * How valuable is X outcome (e.g., in terms of QALYs). This is obviously oversimplified (the actual claims are more distributions rather than point estimates), but it requires you to explicate/stake claims like "even under conservative assumptions X, Y, and Z,  the expected value of this intervention is still really large." Relatedly, it allows you to establish breakeven points. Consider the following:  * Let's suppose you claim achieving some policy agenda outcome would produce somewhere between $1T and $10T of value. * Suppose you argue that spending $100M on some kind of movement/systemic change campaign would increase the likelihood of achieving that outcome by somewhere between 0.1% and 10%. Those confidence intervals are rather large (the probability estimate spans two orders of magnitude), but even with such wide confidence intervals you can claim that a conservative estimate of the expected value is "at least $1B," which is "at least a 10x return on investment."

I don't think it's possible to do an analysis that makes sense at all, given that outcomes are so high variance and depends so much on the skill and strategy and luck of the people working on it. That doesn't mean no one should work on it. Open Philanthropy and the FTX future fund are uniquely positioned to be able to get effective at this kind of work and drive the kind of results no one else can

And I think they know this and have been trying; OpenPhil has done work in land use reform and criminal justice reform, for example. I'm not complaining about wh... (read more)

4
Harrison Durland
2y
I'm a bit confused on where you stand on this: on the one hand, you seem to be suggesting that it's not possible to derive a decent estimate on the likelihood of success, but on the other hand you are still suggesting that you think it is worth funding. I don't dispute that it can be hard to do "accurate" analysis—e.g., to even be within an order of magnitude of accuracy on certain probability or effect-size estimates—but the key behind various back-of-the-envelope calculations (BOTECs) is getting a rough sense of "does this seem to be at least 10:1 expected return on investment given XYZ explicit, dissectible assumptions?"  If the answer is yes, then that's an important signal saying "this is worth deeper-than-BOTEC-level analysis." Certain cause areas like AI safety/governance, biosecurity, and a few others have passed this bar by wide margins even when evidence/arguments were relatively scarce and it was (and still is!) really hard to come up with reliable specific estimates. Explicating your reasoning in such ways is really important for making your analysis more legible/dissectible for others and also for yourself: it is quite easy to think "X is going to happen/work" before laying out the key steps/arguments, but sometimes by explicating your reasoning you (or others) can identify flawed assumptions, outright contradictions, or at least key hinge points in models. Systematic change can be hard to predict, but (I suspect that) arguably everything can be given some kind of probability estimate in theory, even if it's a situation of pure uncertainty that leads to an estimate of 1/n for n possible outcomes (such as ~50% for coin flips). These don't have to be good estimates, but they need to be explicit so that 1) other people can evaluate them, and 2) you can use such calculations in your model (since you can't multiply a number by "?%"). One thing that might be useful in this situation is to establish some kind of "outside view" or reference class: how ofte

the only organizations I know that are trying to get low-income countries to become high-income countries are the World Bank, IMF, and Growth Teams

3
BrownHairedEevee
2y
What about the Center for Global Development and Charter Cities Institute?

I think I'm convinced that getting low-income countries to develop into high-income countries is more important than the abundance agenda. OpenPhil has so much money that I'm pretty sure they should do both. As far as I know, they aren't doing either. A country is not going to develop through malarial net donations.

3
ruthgrace
2y
the only organizations I know that are trying to get low-income countries to become high-income countries are the World Bank, IMF, and Growth Teams

Yes, this is an interesting problem with new smart/planned cities! Probably not a problem with New York, San Francisco, and San Jose though

Thank you Vaidehi! I worked really hard on this and I'm glad it shows :)

appreciate your comment! Thanks for posting

I agree on the natural areas point; I would hope that we can increase density without decreasing the density of parks and playgrounds (though I would definitely be okay with decreasing the size of big ones that don't serve that many people)

I am wary of arguments that we need to do other difficult to do things like improving transit before we can build housing because the practical result is that nothing is going to be done at all, which is worse than if we build more housing and then people had to campaign or lobby to get the transit fixed to accommodate.

3
Guy Raveh
2y
I'm not exactly sure if that's what I mean or not. What I mean is that if you build housing with no infrastructure (like kindergartens or clinics or schools etc), maybe people won't actually come to live there. You have to some way make sure to offer actually valuable essential goods and not bad ones.

What do you think of what I wrote in the post about the USA being like a low income country within a high income country when it comes to health and poverty? I think there's value in making that not happen in high income countries , and it seems more tractable to me than developing a low income country because of the money is already there to do it

I think this statement needs to be more precise. The Quartz article you cite states that the US "has the second-highest rate of poverty among rich countries (poverty here measured by the percentage of people earning less than half the national median income)," but this poverty threshold is still much higher than the International Poverty Line (IPL) used by the World Bank ($1.90/day), and in general, rich countries use higher poverty lines. 81% of those living in South Sudan (which is considered a least developed country) live below the IPL, whereas only 1%... (read more)

thanks for your comment! I'm sure a lot of people reading this are thinking the same thing. Effective altruism in general is biased against systemic change due to it being difficult to measure and outcomes being diffuse. From my post

Pushing an abundance agenda means working towards a world where everyone expects business and government decisions to prioritize the supply of essential goods and services.

This isn't a list of policies, this is a cultural shift. Sure, I've listed a bunch of directly positive effects in my examples, but if this goal was actu... (read more)

-5
Sharmake
2y
6
Harrison Durland
2y
I think it’s fair to contend that EA is “biased” towards high-legibility, quantitative outcomes, but I don’t think that it is very bad on balance. Importantly, EA is fairly open to attempted quantification of normally-hard-to-quantify concepts, but it requires putting in some mental legwork and making plausible quantifications/models (even loose ones) of how valuable this idea is. If you could describe in a step-by-step (e.g., probability X impact) manner a variety of plausible pathways or arguments by which this approach could have really high expected value, I would be interested to see such a model. For example, if you can say “I believe there is a P% chance that spending $R would lead to X outcome(s), which has an F% of producing U QALYs/[or other metric] relative to the counterfactual, creating an expected value of Z QALYs/benefits per dollar spent,” where Z seems like a plausible number (based on the plausibility of the rest of the model), then it probably isn’t something that EA will just dismiss. This is heavily related to Open Philanthropy’s post about reasoning transparency, which (among other benefits) makes it easier for someone else to dissect another person’s claims. I do think it may be difficult to show really high yet plausible expected value for this intervention, but I’d still be open to seeing such an analysis, and personally I think that should probably be an initial, unrequested step before complaining about EA not being willing to consider hard-to-quantify ideas.

I disagree with 2) because I think the movement will be able to get more done with more diverse backgrounds of people who are really good at different things. Even if AI is the most important thing, we need people who understand communications, policy, organizing grassroots movements, and also people who are good at completely unrelated fields who can understand the impact of AI on their field (manufacturing, agricuture, shipping logistics, etc) though there aren't those opportunities to do that work directly in AI right now.

2
Sophia
2y
I strong upvoted this because: 1) I think AI governance is a big deal (the argument for this has been fleshed out elsewhere by others in the community) and  2) I think this comment is directionally correct beyond the AI governance bit even if I don't think it quite fully fleshes out the case for it (I'll have a go at fleshing out the case when I have more time but this is a time-consuming thing to do and my first attempt will be crap even if there is actually something to it).  I think that strong upvoting was appropriate because: 1)  stating beliefs that go against the perceived consensus view is hard and takes courage 2) the only way the effective altruism community develops new good ideas is if people feel they have permission to state views that are different from the community "accepted" view.  I think some example steps for forming new good ideas are: 1) someone states, without a fully fleshed out case, what they believe 2) others then think about whether that seems true to them and begin to flesh out reasons for their gut-level intuition 3) other people pushback on those reasons and point out the nuance 4) the people who initially have the gut-level hunch that the statement is true either change their minds or iterate their argument so it incorporates the nuance that others have pointed out for them. If the latter happens then, 5) More nuanced versions of the arguments are written up and steps 3 to 5 repeat themselves as much as necessary for the new good ideas to have a fleshed out case for them. 

Is the survey for people who work at EA orgs? People who work at organizations that identify as being EA aligned? Or any person doing some kind of direct work (for example at an organization that may not identify with effective altruism even if the individual who works there does)?

1
Tyrone-Jay Barugh
2y
Thanks Ruth. I've updated the post to be clearer that we want feedback from the community generally, including from people who haven't been doing direct work so far - but that we also have specific questions for people with relevant backgrounds.

Yes! Also I suspect that people who think that AI is by far the most important problem might be more concentrated in the san Francisco bay area, compared to other cities with a lot of effective altruists, like London. Personally I think we probably already have enough people working on AI but I was worried about getting downvoted if i put that in my original post, so I scoped it down to something I thought everybody could get on board with (that people shouldn't feel bad about not working on AI)

5
titotal
2y
I wonder how many other people are avoiding discussing their true beliefs about AI for similar reasons? I definitely don't judge anyone for doing so, there's a lot of subtle discouragements for disagreeing with an in-group consensus, even if none of it is deliberate or conscious. You might feel that people will judge you as dumb for not understanding their arguments, or not be receptive to your other points, or have the natural urge to not get into a debate when you are outnumbered, or just want to fit in/be popular. 

Yes that's exactly it! Even if a lot of people think that AI is the most important problem to work on, I would expect only a small minority to have a comparative advantage. I worry that students are setting themselves up for burnout and failure by feeling obligated to work on what's been billed as some as the most pressing/impactful cause area, and I worry that it's getting in the way of people exploring with different roles and figuring out and building out their actual comparative advantage

It's my understanding that in places like Malawi, the paints are oil based and can be manufactured without advanced equipment, whereas in developed countries the paints are latex based and require more complicated equipment to produce the proper emulsion. I'm curious if the manufacturers that you are working with are simply replacing the pigments and continuing with oil-based manufacturing?

1
ClareDonaldson
2y
Thanks Ruth! It's true that oil-based paints are much more common in Malawi relative to water-based paints (aka latex or emulsion) compared to more industrialised countries. Our  best guess is that 60% of decorative paints sold are oil-based in Malawi. And yes, so far the manufacturers we've been speaking to are planning on replacing the lead pigments in their oil-based paints. As far as I know, it's also possible to make water-based paints without complicated/expensive equipment. Some reasons we've heard for why oil-based paints are popular are they're easier to clean, cheaper, longer-lasting, and people having aesthetic preferences for the gloss.  Water-based paint is much less likely to contain lead so it would probably be good if it was used more, but I think it would be harder to change the buying habits of large numbers of people than for manufacturers to replace lead ingredients. 

Love this post!

In software engineering culture, "forced vacation" is not done so much for the good of the person taking it, but the good of the team to make sure that they are set up to reliably cover the person taking the vacation as practice in case anything happens to that person (they might leave or fall ill). It's probably easier for software engineers to substitute for each other than for you to figure out all the different people that would need to cover different aspects of your leadership role though.

i love this and have been using it a bunch! the cuckoo coworking timer has been down today, though :(

Yes, I agree! I think "too much information and people have a difficult time telling what to trust" is a more accurate and nuanced descriptor than "misinformation"! and that your point about

more general improvements in communication strategies/governance/economic growth could be more important.

would go a really long way.

I wonder that if people could more generally feel like they had a say and a stake in the way that the country is run, to the point where a regular person could advocate for improvements for themselves and their communities, that there ... (read more)

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