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