Yeah, I’m pretty sceptical of the judgement of experienced community builders on the sorts of questions like effect of different strategies on community epistemics. I think if I frame this as an intervention “changing community building in x way will improve EA community epistemic” I have a strong prior that it has no effect because most interventions people try to have no or small effect (see famous graph of global health interventions.)
I think the following are some examples of places where you’d think people would have good intuitions about what works well but they don’t
Parenting. We used to just systematically abuse children and think it was good for them (e.g denying children the ability to see their parents in the hospital). There’s a really interesting passage in Invisible China where the authors describe loving grandparents deeply damaging the grandchildren they care for by not giving them enough stimulation as infants.
Education. It’s really really hard to find education interventions which work in rich countries. It’s also interesting that in the US there’s lots of opposition from teachers over teaching phonics despite it being one of the few rich country education interventions with large effect sizes (although it’s hard to judge how much of this is for self-interested reasons)
I think it’s unclear how well you’d expect people to do on the economics examples I gave. I probably would have expected people to do well with cash transfers since in fact lots of people do get cash transfers (e.g pensions, child benefits, inheritance) and do ok with minimum wage since at least some fraction of people have a sense of how the place they work for hires people.
Psychotherapy. We only good treatments that worked for specific mental health conditions (rather than to generally improve people’s lives, I haven’t read anything on this) other than mild-moderate depression when we started doing RCTs. I’m most familiar with OCD treatment specifically and the current best practice was only developed in the late 60s.
Hmm, would you then also say that we should be skeptical about claims about the overall usefulness of university group organising. If you frame it as an intervention of “run x program (intro fellowship, retreat, etc.) that will increase probability someone has a large positive impact”, would you also have a strong prior that it has no effect because most interventions people try especially education interventions which is a lot of what uni groups try to do have no or small effect?
Yeah, I’m pretty sceptical of the judgement of experienced community builders on the sorts of questions like effect of different strategies on community epistemics. I think if I frame this as an intervention “changing community building in x way will improve EA community epistemic” I have a strong prior that it has no effect because most interventions people try to have no or small effect (see famous graph of global health interventions.)
I think the following are some examples of places where you’d think people would have good intuitions about what works well but they don’t
Parenting. We used to just systematically abuse children and think it was good for them (e.g denying children the ability to see their parents in the hospital). There’s a really interesting passage in Invisible China where the authors describe loving grandparents deeply damaging the grandchildren they care for by not giving them enough stimulation as infants.
Education. It’s really really hard to find education interventions which work in rich countries. It’s also interesting that in the US there’s lots of opposition from teachers over teaching phonics despite it being one of the few rich country education interventions with large effect sizes (although it’s hard to judge how much of this is for self-interested reasons)
I think it’s unclear how well you’d expect people to do on the economics examples I gave. I probably would have expected people to do well with cash transfers since in fact lots of people do get cash transfers (e.g pensions, child benefits, inheritance) and do ok with minimum wage since at least some fraction of people have a sense of how the place they work for hires people.
Psychotherapy. We only good treatments that worked for specific mental health conditions (rather than to generally improve people’s lives, I haven’t read anything on this) other than mild-moderate depression when we started doing RCTs. I’m most familiar with OCD treatment specifically and the current best practice was only developed in the late 60s.
Hmm, would you then also say that we should be skeptical about claims about the overall usefulness of university group organising. If you frame it as an intervention of “run x program (intro fellowship, retreat, etc.) that will increase probability someone has a large positive impact”, would you also have a strong prior that it has no effect because most interventions people try especially education interventions which is a lot of what uni groups try to do have no or small effect?