What do you believe that seems important and that you think most effective altruists / rationalists would disagree with you about?
What do you believe that seems important and that you think most people in journalism/the media would disagree with you about?
What do you think effective altruists / rationalists are most often, most significantly, or most annoyingly wrong about?
What’s an important way your own views/beliefs have changed recently?
(I’m perhaps most interested in your independent impression—i.e., what you’d believe before updating on the fact that other reasonable people believe other things.)
I’ve said elsewhere in this AMA, but I suspect that journalism, for all its many flaws, actually is really important, and that democratic societies would be much harder to organise without a free press. I suspect that journalism isn’t hugely popular among rationalists (and since I tend to think of EAs as being the same people, I assume it’s not hugely popular with them either), but I think it’s really important.
I think there’s a huge miscalibration about what’s “actually” important in the media – there’s a huge focus on problems of the Western world, and especially US problems (which then get exported to the UK and other places; eg I think problems with race in the UK are very different to the ones in the US, but we see everything through a US lens). A murder in the UK (or a school shooting in the US) is objectively less important than 1,000 people dying every day of malaria, but it gets many times the coverage. But it’s hard to say “actually this doesn’t matter” when it’s some named person dead in a horrible way, and compare it to thousands of real but faceless individuals dying off-camera.
Funnily enough I think Covid has shifted this a bit because it’s a genuinely global and important story about infectious diseases and vaccinations. But I’d love to see more focus in the mainstream media on diseases of poverty in the developing world, things like that. That said—as I’ve said elsewhere, you can’t run a media industry on the things that you OUGHT to write about, you have to give readers what they want as well.
Since this is about journalism, I’ll stick to that example: I think EAs/rationalists tend to assume journalists are out to destroy people. It’s not that that’s wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete. For instance, when I’ve written about quack charities – autismcharities telling people not to get vaccinated, say, or to have awful heavy-metal chelation therapy or whatever – it is 100% my intention to damage those charities’ ability to function, or get their CEOs to resign, because I believe that they are damaging children, and that revealing their bad practices is good for society. I think most people here would agree with me. But other journalists are doing the same thing—they’ve just sometimes made different judgments about what “good for society” is, and I very often disagree with those judgments. But they’re not out to destroy for the fun of it; they’re usually trying to do good. (That said, there is a tendency to measure journalistic impact in how many people you’ve forced to resign, which is understandable but kind of icky.)
Oh dammit I forgot 4). Hmm. This is such a big and important question and I should have some ready answer for it.
I suppose my most general answer, and it’s not all that recent, is that I’ve become MUCH less trusting of the scientific literature in loads of fields, especially social sciences, because I’ve become much more aware of the statistical problems. But that’s a bit of a dodge, isn’t it.
And relatedly I think in Covid times I’ve become less happy with the public-health-institutions model of scientific/health evidence, of thinking “there isn’t an RCT supporting it” equals “it doesn’t work”; I’ve become much more of a Bayesian, or at least I try to think in terms of probabilities and best guesses and cost-benefit analyses rather than “this works” and “this has not been rigorously shown to work ergo we will say it doesn’t work”. I was already on that route I think but it’s become very obvious in the last year
Thanks for your answers! (Both here and elsewhere in this AMA.)
Not sure if you’ll come back to answer followups, but on the off chance you might:
Regarding your answer to 1, what do you think the implications of that should be for rationalist/EA beliefs or behaviours? E.g., is it that you think we should ourselves spend more time reading journalists’ writing? That more of us should go into journalism ourselves? That we should donate more to support high-quality journalism? That we should just probably be doing something more in relation to journalism, so we should do some research or thinking to figure out what that is? Something else?
And regarding your answer to 3, it sounds like you’re actually saying that journalists quite often are out to destroy people, and that the mistake is just to assume that this is for the fun of it rather than because the journalist sincerely thinks it’s right to destroy those people?
Thanks for doing this AMA!
What do you believe that seems important and that you think most effective altruists / rationalists would disagree with you about?
What do you believe that seems important and that you think most people in journalism/the media would disagree with you about?
What do you think effective altruists / rationalists are most often, most significantly, or most annoyingly wrong about?
What’s an important way your own views/beliefs have changed recently?
(I’m perhaps most interested in your independent impression—i.e., what you’d believe before updating on the fact that other reasonable people believe other things.)
I’ve said elsewhere in this AMA, but I suspect that journalism, for all its many flaws, actually is really important, and that democratic societies would be much harder to organise without a free press. I suspect that journalism isn’t hugely popular among rationalists (and since I tend to think of EAs as being the same people, I assume it’s not hugely popular with them either), but I think it’s really important.
I think there’s a huge miscalibration about what’s “actually” important in the media – there’s a huge focus on problems of the Western world, and especially US problems (which then get exported to the UK and other places; eg I think problems with race in the UK are very different to the ones in the US, but we see everything through a US lens). A murder in the UK (or a school shooting in the US) is objectively less important than 1,000 people dying every day of malaria, but it gets many times the coverage. But it’s hard to say “actually this doesn’t matter” when it’s some named person dead in a horrible way, and compare it to thousands of real but faceless individuals dying off-camera.
Funnily enough I think Covid has shifted this a bit because it’s a genuinely global and important story about infectious diseases and vaccinations. But I’d love to see more focus in the mainstream media on diseases of poverty in the developing world, things like that. That said—as I’ve said elsewhere, you can’t run a media industry on the things that you OUGHT to write about, you have to give readers what they want as well.
Since this is about journalism, I’ll stick to that example: I think EAs/rationalists tend to assume journalists are out to destroy people. It’s not that that’s wrong exactly, but it’s incomplete. For instance, when I’ve written about quack charities – autism charities telling people not to get vaccinated, say, or to have awful heavy-metal chelation therapy or whatever – it is 100% my intention to damage those charities’ ability to function, or get their CEOs to resign, because I believe that they are damaging children, and that revealing their bad practices is good for society. I think most people here would agree with me. But other journalists are doing the same thing—they’ve just sometimes made different judgments about what “good for society” is, and I very often disagree with those judgments. But they’re not out to destroy for the fun of it; they’re usually trying to do good. (That said, there is a tendency to measure journalistic impact in how many people you’ve forced to resign, which is understandable but kind of icky.)
Oh dammit I forgot 4). Hmm. This is such a big and important question and I should have some ready answer for it.
I suppose my most general answer, and it’s not all that recent, is that I’ve become MUCH less trusting of the scientific literature in loads of fields, especially social sciences, because I’ve become much more aware of the statistical problems. But that’s a bit of a dodge, isn’t it.
And relatedly I think in Covid times I’ve become less happy with the public-health-institutions model of scientific/health evidence, of thinking “there isn’t an RCT supporting it” equals “it doesn’t work”; I’ve become much more of a Bayesian, or at least I try to think in terms of probabilities and best guesses and cost-benefit analyses rather than “this works” and “this has not been rigorously shown to work ergo we will say it doesn’t work”. I was already on that route I think but it’s become very obvious in the last year
Thanks for your answers! (Both here and elsewhere in this AMA.)
Not sure if you’ll come back to answer followups, but on the off chance you might:
Regarding your answer to 1, what do you think the implications of that should be for rationalist/EA beliefs or behaviours? E.g., is it that you think we should ourselves spend more time reading journalists’ writing? That more of us should go into journalism ourselves? That we should donate more to support high-quality journalism? That we should just probably be doing something more in relation to journalism, so we should do some research or thinking to figure out what that is? Something else?
And regarding your answer to 3, it sounds like you’re actually saying that journalists quite often are out to destroy people, and that the mistake is just to assume that this is for the fun of it rather than because the journalist sincerely thinks it’s right to destroy those people?