SamiM
Posts 8
Comments29
Topic contributions4
as Will stated in his earlier email to you, four of those five experts were consulted. I am happy to provide evidence for this.
Minor nitpick: Was one of them not consulted, or can evidence not be provided?
Hey Sean, happy Thanksgiving!
I was wondering why StrongerMinds focuses on women. Is it because women especially suffer from depression, or maybe helping women has better downstream effects? Another reason?
Just a note, Michelle has a Ph.D. so in the formal message, "Dr." would be more appropriate than "Ms." People usually have their credentials on Linkedin, so that information might be easy to find.
I guess it depends on the reason they’re isolated. And the more “expensive” interventions in terms of inconvenience to regulars should be weighted by the excepted gain. A proxy for that might be the number of isolated EAs.
Examples of interventions would be diversifying meetup times/locations if it’s due to time/location conflicts. It might be easier to test this by adding online events and comparing the number of new attendees.
Marisa mentioned that 1-1’s (with the organizers or other members) would also be beneficial and would reduce the awkwardness of joining a meetup where everyone but you knows each other.
Another idea might be to sponsor local groups by providing support or training, like how (I imagine) EA Philippines does to their local chapters. But seems easier for a country group to do this to a city/uni group, rather than a city group “sponsoring” another city.
I think you're right. I guess I took Gwen's comment at face value and tried to figure out how development aid will look different due to the "huge implications", which was hard.
Hey, I thought this discussion could use some data. I also added some personal impressions.
These are the results of the 2020 SSC survey.
For the question "How would you describe your opinion of the [sic] the idea of "human biodiversity", eg the belief that races differ genetically in socially relevant ways?"
20.8% answered 4 and 8.7% answered 5.
Where 1 is Very unfavorable and 5 is Very favorable
The answers look similar for 2019
Taking that at face value, 30% of Scott’s readers think favorably of “HBD”.
(I guess you could look at it as "80% of SSC readers fail to condemn scientific racism". But that doesn't strike me as charitable.)
From the same survey, 13.6% identified as EAs, and 33.4% answered sorta EA.
I should mention that the survey has some nonsensical answers (IQs of 186, verbal SATs of 30). And it appears that many answers lean liberal (Identifying as liberals, thinking favorably of feminism, and more open borders, while thinking unfavorably of Trump.)
A while ago, Gwern wrote
“... If HBD is true, then all the existing correlational and longitudinal evidence immediately implies that group differences are the major reason why per capita income in the USA are 3-190x per capita income in Africa, that group differences are a major driver of history and the future, that intelligence has enormous spillovers totally ignored in all current analyses. This has huge implications for historical research, immigration policy (regression to the mean), dysgenics discussions (minor to irrelevant from just the individual differences perspective but long-term existential threat from HBD), development aid, welfare programs, education, and pretty much every single topic in the culture wars touching on 'sexism' or 'racism' where the supposedly iron-clad evidence is confounded or based on rational priors.”
I’m trying to imagine what global development charities EAs who believe HBD donate to, and I’m having a hard time.
Assuming this implies that some EAs (1-5%?) believe in this, I would reckon they're more focused on X-risks or animal welfare. (I don't think this is true anymore, see comment below) It would be helpful to see how the people who identify as EAs answered this question.
Finally, from Scott's email (which I think sharing is a horrible violation of privacy), the last sentence is emblematic of the attitude of lots of people in the community (including myself). My Goodreads contains lots of books I expect to disagree with or be offended by (Gyn/Ecology, The Bell Curve), but I still think it's important to look into them.
Valuing new insights sometimes means looking into things no one else would, and that has been very useful for the community (fish/insect welfare, longtermism). But unfortunately, one risk is that at least some people will come out believing (outrageously) wrong things. I think that is worth it.
On a personal note, I’m black, and a community organizer, and I haven't encountered anything but respect and love from the EA community.
I still think it works for some causes. I met people who thought it wasn't just bad, but evil to do wild animal welfare stuff. I'm not sure why, maybe their introduction to the idea was about predator euthanasia or something.